A9 dual carriageway road maintenance policy and road repair history: EIR release

Information requested

I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act relating to a road your organisation is responsible for maintaining.

Specifically, my query relates to the A9 dual carriageway, 1.5km northeast of the junction of the A9 and B8033, Dunblane, towards Perth.

Please can you send me:

1. A copy of your current road maintenance policy relating to that road. Please send me the full policy, but this should include details of the intended frequency of road safety inspections, how these inspections should be conducted and the maximum time between identification of a defect and repairs being carried out.

2. A copy of the road repair history for that road over the past year. Again, please send me the full road repair history, but this should include: - dates of all safety inspections between October 24th 2023 and January 24th 2024.
- details of how safety inspections were undertaken (walked or driven, speed of inspection vehicle etc)
- details of all carriageway defects identified, with description, date and time
- details of how the authority handled these defects, what repairs were undertaken and the time between the identification of each defect and a repair being carried out.

On 19 April you clarified that the date range for all information requested should be for 17/04/2023 – 17/04/2024 and that the location of interest was as per the following link https://what3words.com/liberated.deployed.heats

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 Annex A to this response for a copy of our current road maintenance policy.

Please see Annex B to this response for a copy of the safety inspections records, including repairs carried out, between 17/04/2023 – 17/04/2024. An exception under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs (personal information) applies to some of the information requested because it is personal data of a third party and disclosing it would contravene the data protection principles in Article 5(1) of the General Data Protection Regulation and in section 34(1) of the Data Protection Act 2018. This exception is not subject to the 'public interest test', so we are not required to consider if the public interest in disclosing the information outweighs the public interest in applying the exception.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at http://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.

EIR 202400409915 - Information released - Annex A

File type

163 page PDF

File size

2.5 MB

EIR 202400409915 - Information released - Annex B

File type

Excel document

File size

58.3 kB