All records held by Transport Scotland relating to the A7 at Boleside: EIR release

Information requested

You asked for:

1. Copies of inspection, maintenance and repair records held by Transport Scotland relating to highway trees on the A7 trunk road in the Boleside area for the period from 1 December 2005 to 31 December 2016.

2. Copies of all records held by Transport Scotland relating to any reports or complaints of defects relating to highway trees on the A7 trunk road in the Boleside area for the period from 1 December 2005 to 31 December 2016.

3. Copies of all records held by Transport Scotland relating to works carried out in relation to roadside trees on the A7 trunk road in the area of Boleside for the period from 1 December 2005 to 31 December 2016.”

 You agreed on 20 January to reduce the timescale of your request to 1 June 2014 to 30 June 2016.

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.

1. While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance we do not have some of the information you have requested.  Therefore we are refusing your request under the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs. This is because there were no tree related incidents recorded during the routine inspections carried out at this location during this period, therefore no maintenance or repairs were required.

Please see Annex A for details of the routine inspections undertaken at the location requested.

2. 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.  This is because most of the trees at the location are out with the trunk road boundary and we do not hold any information in relation to complaints of defects relating those on our network.

3. 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. This is because no works were carried out in relation to roadside trees within the trunk road boundary.

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.

FOI/19/02526 Annex A

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4 page PDF

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68.2 kB