Publication - FOI/EIR release

A96 Dualling East of Huntly to Aberdeen Scheme: dualling at Inverurie: EIR release

Published: 26 September 2019
Topic: Public sector, Transport
FOI reference: FOI/19/02011
Date received: 27 August 2019
Date responded: 24 September 2019

Information request and response under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004.

Information requested

“Under the terms of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 and the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 please could you supply me with all and any information, minutes of meetings, emails, materials (including, but not limited to, reports and including the dates on which data/information were/was collected and reports written), dated correspondence etc that you have in relation to communications between Michael Matheson and/or his staff, and Transport Scotland and/or their contractors concerning the ‘online’ dualling of the A96 at Inverurie.
Given that you may consider the materials/information requested to be extensive, please supply materials as they become available, as this request is urgent and time critical.”

Response

As all of 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 refer to Annexes A to L in response to your request for information in relation to “communications between Michael Matheson and/or his staff, and Transport Scotland and/or their contractors concerning the ‘online’ dualling of the A96 at Inverurie”.
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(s) 11(2) of the EIRs applies to that information.
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. This exception has been applied to Annexes B, E, F, & I contained within this response.

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