The financial impact of bridge strikes: EIR release

Information requested

1. The financial impact, i.e. total costs, bridge strikes (defined as when a motor vehicle crashes into a bridge) have on Transport Scotland broken down by year and region for the past five years?
2. The percentage of this amount that is recovered through insurance?

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.

Response to your request

Transport Scotland has contracts in place with four Operating Companies (OC), as well as a number of Design, Build, Finance and Operate concessions (DBFO), that manage and maintain the Scottish trunk road network on our behalf.

Under the current Network Maintenance Contracts (NMC) all Operating Companies indemnify Transport Scotland for any damage costs up to £50,000. Under the previous 4G contracts this was £10,000. The NMC South unit contracts commenced in 2020 with the North contracts commencing in 2022. Therefore, the cost to Transport Scotland will not be the entire cost of bridge strikes on the Scottish trunk road network.

Transport Scotland records bridge strikes using the operating companies regional unit areas and the total costs to Transport Scotland for the last 5 years are recorded in the table below:

Unit	Total Costs to TS	% Recovered from Insurance
North West	£31,092 (2022)	0%
North East	£567,000 (2019)	99% (£560,000)
South West	£0	N/a
South East	£0	N/a

About FOI

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