Road-building projects since May 2023
Case reference EIR2024/01178
Received 8 July 2024
Published 25 July 2024
Request
Response
All correspondence between the council (including councillors) and government departments and ministries since 1 May 2023 on the subject of any and all road-building projects in Herefordshire.
A: The above request is refused under Regulation 12 (4) (b) of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 on the grounds that the request is manifestly unreasonable.
To carry out this request, ICT would firstly need to undertake a search of our systems to locate and extract relevant emails, including emails which have been archived or from the systems of officers who have subsequently left the council. ICT have run three initial searches using key words. The first searched, based on a key word search of relevant road scheme names returned 458,534 emails. A second search based on a key word search using relevant government department / ministry names e.g. Department for Transport returned 158,023 emails. The final search based on key words of road names and relevant officers / councillors returned 149,672 emails. Whichever return was used would then involve a manual check of each of the emails to check for relevance to your request.
Once extracted and saved to the network drive, the next step would be for officers in the FOI team to manually open and read each email to retrieve and extract the requested information. The Information Commissioner's guidance on this exception states 'the costs of considering if the information is exempt can be taken into account as relevant arguments under Regulation 12 (4)(b)'. As such the team would need to check each email to see if it was relevant to the request.
It is considered that it is extremely likely that exceptions would apply to any emails held, such as Regulation 6 and Regulation 13. Time spent on redaction has not been included in the time calculations contained in this response.
Consideration would also need to be given as to whether any email was a duplicate which needed to be removed from further consideration (if an email had been sent / received by multiple officers, the search would have retrieved the same email for each officer's account, and so duplicates would need to be discounted otherwise the exact same email would need to be checked for exceptions, or redacted multiple times, something which would take even more officer time). It is estimated (based on a previous time calculation which was accepted by the Information Commissioner's Office) that retrieving and extracting information from relevant emails for the return which generated the fewest number of emails:
149,672 total emails x 1.078 minutes per email = 2,689 hours (384 days)
Total cost of officer time @ £25 per hour = £67,225
The time and costs involved would be greater if the emails generated by the first or second email searches were manually checked instead.
This exception is subject to a public interest test, and accordingly I have weighed up the public interest in disclosure against the public interest in not disclosing the information as follows:
The public interest in disclosure:
The Environmental Information Regulations specifically state that public authorities should apply a presumption in favour of disclosure when considering environmental information.
Release of environmental information promotes transparency and accountability, increases public awareness and understanding of environmental matters which in turn enables the general public to more effectively participate in decision making.
The public interest in non-disclosure:
Herefordshire is a small rural county. The current (2021 census) estimate of the population is 187,100. Two fifths of residents live in the most rural areas of the county. Herefordshire has the 4th lowest overall population density in England (the 9th lowest of all 'top tier' local authorities in England & Wales) at 85 people per square kilometre (or 0.85 per hectare; 220 per square mile). Likewise Herefordshire Council is comparatively small, with small numbers of officers in each team.
The FOI team, which administers the FOI / EIR process for Herefordshire Council consists of just 1.8 FTE officers. On average the council receives 100 information requests each month. Last year the team processed 936 FOI and 142 EIR requests, and a further 288 requests as Business as Usual. Complying with a request of this nature would impact upon our ability to process other FOI / EIR requests, particularly within statutory timescales. Other officers within the wider Information Governance team would need to be diverted from their work to help administer these requests whilst work on this request took place, but that would negatively impact upon the wider team's ability to do other work such as subject access requests (which also have statutory timescales), investigation of data breaches and offering guidance on data protection matters, which can involve personal data held by the council regarding residents.
Officers in relevant service areas such as Highways would also need to check the emails to see whether an exception needed to be applied to the contents, and the time that they would spend checking these in conjunction with the Freedom of Information team would reduce the time that they have available to work on Highways matters.
The amount of time that it would take to collate the information requested would divert resources and limit the council's ability to deliver other public services, disruption which would be detrimental to the wider public. We have considered whether we could deploy other means under the Regulations to provide you with this information, such as extending the statutory response timescales for a further 20 working days on the grounds of complexity and volume of information, or by issuing you with a charging notice. However, even if the timescales were extended or a charging notice issued, this request would still place a disproportionate burden on the council which would be manifestly unreasonable.
Taking the above into consideration, I have found the public interest in disclosure in this case is outweighed by the public interest in not disclosing the information.
If you wish to discuss ways in which your request could be reduced in scope to make it more manageable, such as reducing the time frame, specifying officers or councillors you wish to have sight of the emails for, or choosing a particular Government department / ministry or specifying a Highways Scheme please let us know.
Please note that, even if your request was reduced in scope to make it more manageable, the requested information could still be withheld if other exemptions apply e.g. for third party personal data.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.