Personal injury accidents on slip road from M876 at Junction 7 to M9 Eastbound: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for “details of road traffic collision and accidents that have occurred on the M876 junction 7 southbound to MP 9 eastbound slip road, Falkirk”.

After a clarification request you confirmed the timescale of your request on 19 September 2019 as the last 3 years and that the MP9 should have been the M9.

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.

Response

There were 2 personal injury accidents on the slip road from the M876 at Junction 7 to where it joins the M9 Eastbound from 1 January 2016 to 12 June 2019 (latest date which data is available for the area). Please note that the information provided is based on the current figures available, extracted from Transport Scotland Accident Manager Database on the 8 October 2019.  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.