Total cost per route of motorways in Scotland: EIR release

Information requested

The total cost per route of other motorways in Scotland over the same time span as the M90. 

Response

As the information you have requested is 'environmental information' for the purposes of the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs), we are required to deal with your request under those Regulations. We are applying the exemption at section 39(2) of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (FOISA), so that we do not also have to deal with your request under FOISA.

This exemption is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exemption. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exemption, because there is no public interest in dealing with the same request under two different regimes.

This is essentially a technical point and has no material effect on the outcome of your request.

Please see table below showing the financial year maintenance spend for each motorway covering the period 2017/18 - 2020/21:

Route	2017/18	2018/19	2019/20	2020/21
M74	£2,662,762	£3,513,986	£6,453,042	£3,325,049
M77	£1,434,644	£446,011	£816,837	£656,099
M8	£17,028,450	£18,844,592	£13,177,953	£6,441,248
M80	£1,755,418	£1,449,447	£1,405,040	£1,257,668
M823	£2,006,287	£1,187,355	£1,682,346	£562,336
M876	£833,822	£1,252,324	£1,036,847	£275,775
M898	£54,816	£250,191	£187,085	£59,809
M9	£5,780,893	£5,870,491	£5,235,203	£3,830,812
M90	£23,248,705	£14,777,650	£19,262,731	£8,412,885

Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), Transport Scotland is not required to provide information which it does not have. At the moment. we do not have some of the information you have requested. This is because, for FY 2020/21, we only hold road maintenance spend through the operating company contracts until 30 November 2020 although an update is expected in May/June of this year.

This exception is subject to the 'public interest test'. Therefore, taking account of all the circumstances of this case, we have considered if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in information about maintenance spend, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

About FOI

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