Breakdown of use and expenditure of the Forth Road Bridge: EIR release

Information requested

1. How many days the Forth Road Bridge has been fully open to motorised vehicles since the Queensferry Crossing was opened on 30th August 2017.

2. How much money has been spent in maintaining/repairing and upgrading the Forth Road Bridge since the Queensferry Crossing was opened to date.

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. The Forth Road Bridge has been fully open to traffic for 754 days between 30 August 2017 and 29 April 2021. Please note that this does not include days where traffic management, such as contraflow, was located on the bridge.

2. 

Financial Year	Spend
2017/18	£12,955,834
2018/19	£11,029,177
2019/20	£14,687,199
2020/21	£14,119,275

Under the terms of the exception at regulation 10(4)(a) of the EIRs (information not held), Transport Scotland is not required to provide information which it does not have. We do not have some of the information you have requested because spend is recorded by financial year and we are unable to break the 2017/18 spend down further to start from August. However, I have provided the 2017/18 spend for comparison.

This exception 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 exception. We have found that, on balance, the public interest lies in favour of upholding the exception. While we recognise that there may be some public interest in information about the Forth Road Bridge, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

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.