A9 Inverness to Thurso route and A99 Latheron to Wick road closures: EIR release

Information requested

“Can we please have information about the amount of times the A9 and also the A99 Inverness to Wick road has been closed for 2018-2019 and 2019-date. The amount of road accidents on the A9 and A99 for 2018-2019 and 2019 - to date.”

You clarified the location of your request on 26 August as the A9 Inverness to Thurso route and the A99 Latheron to Wick route.

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 table below details the information held by our Operating Company on the number of times the A9 Inverness to Thurso route and the A99 Latheron to Wick route was closed in 2018-2019 and 2019 to date. This number includes planned closures for works and closures due to accidents.

Route	2018 closures	2019 closures
A9 Inverness to Thurso	20	28
A99 Latheron to Wick	2	4

There were 41 accidents on the A9 between Inverness and Thurso (between Longman Roundabout to the the junction with the A836 northwest of Thurso) and four accidents on the A99 from Latheron to Wick (from its junction with the A9 to the junction with the A882) from 1 January 2018 to 24 February 2019 (latest date which data is available for the Northern area). 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:

•  We only hold accident information which is provided to us by Police Scotland
•  We do not hold information relating to damage only accidents (i.e. not involving an injury)
•  We only hold 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.

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.