Lack of winter salt treatment on the M74 Junction 9: EIR release
Information request and response under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004.
Information requested
Why the M74 at Junction 9 was not salted between 0000 on 23 January and 1200 on 25 January.
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.
Our Operating Company, Scotland TranServ’s Winter Service Duty Officer is responsible for decision making of winter treatments based on information received from their expert weather forecaster and using the agreed 4th Generation contract matrix.
On 23 January the section of the trunk road network M74 junction 9 was not treated as temperatures were not forecast to go below +3 degrees.
On 24 January the section of the trunk road network at M74 junction 9 was not treated as temperatures were forecast to go below +1 degrees to +0.9 degrees only for a short period of time between 03:00 and 05:00 on 25 January. This section of network is a winter service patrol route and a spreader was actively monitoring the route between the hours of 02:00 and 10:00 and reporting back to the Winter Service Duty Officer within Scotland TranServ’s Control Room.
We have reviewed the weather sensor data closest to M74 Junction 9 and it illustrates that temperatures did not drop below +1 degrees during the overnight period of 24 January through to 25 January.
Annex A to this response shows the Daily Winter Form showing the decision made.
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.
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Contact
Please quote the FOI reference
Central Enquiry Unit
Email: ceu@gov.scot
Phone: 0300 244 4000
The Scottish Government
St Andrews House
Regent Road
Edinburgh
EH1 3DG
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