A7 road between Fountain Hall and Heriot junctions: EIR release

“I would like to request information on how many road collisions where 1 or more cars have been involved in on the A7 road between the Fountain Hall junction and Heriot junction in the last year. And also who owns this bit of road - or who is responsible for looking after it. I was involved in an accident on this road Friday just past and I have seen that there has been an accident on the same road this morning which is a lot more serious. If you do no hold this information could you please guide me to who could provide this.”

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.

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we do not have 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 that there were zero injury accidents on this section of the A7 ( A7 approx. 50 metres north of Heriot Junction to approx. 50 metres south of Fountain Hall Junction ) in the latest 12 month period available.

Please note that the information provided is based on the current figures available. The following are potential reasons for an accident not appearing on our system:

• Transport Scotland only holds accident information which is provided to us by Police Scotland.
• Transport Scotland does not hold information relating to damage only accidents (i.e. not involving an injury).
• Transport Scotland only holds accident information for the trunk road network.
• The accident information Transport Scotland holds is subject to change.  E.g. we receive late returns from Police Scotland, who are responsible for recording details of injury accidents.
• Annual Scottish accident figures are published by Transport Scotland on a yearly basis and can be found by entering Reported Road Casualties Scotland into your search engine