Amount spent on maintaining Forth Road Bridge since August 2017: FOI release

FOI reference: FOI/18/02114  
Date received: 8 August 2018
Date responded: 5 September 2018

 

1) Since August 30th 2017, how much money has been spent maintaining the Forth Road Bridge?

2) Since August 30th 2017, how many vehicles have crossed the Forth Road Bridge?

3) Since August 30th 2017, how many unauthorised vehicles (those not permitted to use the crossing) have crossed the Forth Road Bridge?”

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.

I have numbered our response for ease of reference.

1. The amount spent on maintaining the Forth Road Bridge since 30 August 2017 is £22,697,049.77.

2 and 3. In regards to your questions asking for information in relation to vehicles crossing the Forth Road Bridge and how many unauthorised vehicles have crossed since August 2017, please refer to Annex A of this request.

Reasons for not providing information

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have some of the information you have requested.  Therefore we are refusing your request under the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs.  The reasons why that exception applies is the Annex to this letter. We do not have constant monitoring of the bridge so cannot supply data for August 2017 to January 2018.

 

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