Pavement gritting policy in Cambridgeshire

Dear Cambridgeshire County Council,

I would like to understand better the system in place of gritting
or salting pavements and pedestrian walkways in icy weather.

1: Could you please provide any documents related to the
development of your gritting policy for pavements?

In particular could you include any risk assessments, including the
numbers of additional pedestrian injuries that you assessed likely
to arise from your policy of excluding most pavements from your
gritting regime, and the methodology used for calculating this?

2: Your website states that you grit pavements in "town and village
centres" only if "icy conditions persist for several days." Could
you provide:

** The criteria you use to determine whether a stretch of pavement
is important enough to be a target for gritting, and details of how
these criteria were arrived at
** A list of the stretches of pavement that meet these criteria,
preferably broken down by area

** The criteria you use to determine when icy conditions have
persisted long enough / severely enough to apply grit to pavements
and details of how these criteria were arrived at
** A list of the occasions over the last ten years that these
criteria have been met, with a list, for each occasion, of which
stretches of the "target" pavement (if any) were actually gritted
on each occasion

(in all the above take "gritting" to include "salting", and take
"pavement" to include all pedestrian walkways)

Yours faithfully,

Mr A Bernard

Dear Cambridgeshire County Council,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of
Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Cambridgeshire County
Council's handling of my FOI request 'Pavement gritting policy in
Cambridgeshire'.

I requested documentation relating to the *development* of the
policy, including any risk assessments that were made in the course
of this development. Instead I received a synopsis of the policy,
with no details as to how this was arrived at.

The County Council says that they have requested information from
the NHS about injuries, but (whilst interesting) this is
retrospective, and I inquired about their prospective assessments,
at the time that policy was being formulated, of injuries *likely
to arise*.

I also requested details of which pavements were covered by the
policy of gritting in extreme weather, and by which systematic
means this list was arrived at. This was not forthcoming at all.

Finally, the council says "We do not hold information in relation
to a list of occasions over the last 10 years that these criteria
have been met." While I accept this, they do not state how long
they do retain this information, or provide the subset of it that
they have available.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is
available on the Internet at this address:
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/pa...

Yours faithfully,

A Bernard