Money spent on road maintenance and resurfacing after the removal of road tax

Request 745130708  

​Please advise on an annual basis how much has been spent on road maintenance and resurfacing starting from 1994 after the removal of road tax and the introduction of a levy on the fuel price.

Response 

The Scheduled Public Authority (SPA) carries out various types of road maintenance annually, including but not limited to carriage way, street lighting, road markings, highway structures plus reactive and planned maintenance.   

The SPA does not maintain a list of the annual combined road maintenance costs, and to respond to this request would require extraction and manipulation of data to produce new Information.  A Scheduled Public Authority is not required to manipulate and create new data sets, therefore, Article 3 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 therefore applies.

The SPA’s current and previous systems are not configured in a way that will allow extraction of the details requested from 1994 to date.  A manual search of records would be required in order to complete and verify this information.  

It has been estimated that to provide the information requested would exceed the 12.5 hours allowed for Freedom of Information responses in accordance with Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014. Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has therefore been applied 

Articles applied 

Article 3 - Meaning of “information held by a public authority” 

For the purposes of this Law, information is held by a public authority if – 

(a)     it is held by the authority, otherwise than on behalf of another person; or 

(b)     it is held by another person on behalf of the authority. 

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost  

(2) Despite paragraph (1), a scheduled public authority may still supply the information requested on payment to it of a fee determined by the authority in the manner prescribed by Regulations for the purposes of this Article. 

(3) Regulations may provide that, in such circumstances as the Regulations prescribe, if two or more requests for information are made to a scheduled public authority – 

(a) by one person; or 

(b) by different persons who appear to the scheduled public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign, the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the estimated total cost of complying with all of them. ​