Further information pertaining to payments made to Jacobs and BEAR Scotland: EIR release

Information requested

In relation to your previous FOI application (202100224562) you asked the following:

1) Can I have the information on spending only in relation to works on the A83 at the rest and be thankful and old military road extracted from these totals.
2) Can I confirm my understanding that the response is that there has been no process to consider a CPO of the OMR and therefore there are no records or correspondence in that regard?

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.

To aid with my response I have retained the numbering from the request above:

1) 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 the information you have requested because our finance system does not allow us to extract the totals for each
companies spend in relation to the Rest and Be Thankful.

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 Rest and Be Thankful, clearly we cannot provide information which we do not hold.

However, please see the total spend on the Rest and Be Thankful, for design, investigation, monitoring and construction below:
 

Financial Year	Total spent per financial year
21/22 FY	£4,245,478.33*
20/21 FY	£8,601,621.90
19/20 FY	£1,026,510.71
18/19 FY	£3,471,101.11
17/18 FY	£857,906.07
16/17 FY	£609,510.70
TOTAL	£18,812,128.82

*To date

2) I can confirm your understanding is correct. As there has been no process to consider a CPO of the OMR to date there are no records or correspondence relating to this.

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.