Transport Scotland - complaints of roads in Inverclyde: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for “In each of the last five years, how many complaints has Transport Scotland received about roads in Inverclyde it is responsible for, for example the A8 and the A78; what was the nature of the complaints, ie potholes, traffic light issues etc; and what action was taken, if any, to remedy the complaints? Could you please break the figures down per year?”

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.

The following tables provide the number of complaints received by our Operating Company for the South West Unit for the A8 and A78 from 2014 – 2019.

A8

Year	Number of complaints
2014	30
2015	37
2016	37
2017	25
2018	88
2019 to date	56
Total 2014 - 2019	273

 

A78

Year	Number of complaints
2014	32
2015	70
2016	59
2017	74
2018	79
2019 to date	45
Total 2014 - 2019	359

 

The additional information about the nature of the complaint and actions taken are in the enclosed CD. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we are unable to provide some of the information you have requested because an exception(s) under regulation 11(2) of the EIRs applies to that information.  This is 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.

Due to the size of the files we are unable to upload the documents referred to above.
If you wish to consider, please contact us at the address below and we will be happy to provide.

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.