Details of Roads and Pavements resurfaced under Streets Ahead

The request was refused by Sheffield City Council.

Dear Sheffield City Council,

I would like to know details of the resurfacing work that has been achieved since 2012 under the Streets Ahead contract between SCC and Amey.
This falls into the two categories of Roads and Pavement work.

In the case of Roads please supply me with a full list of roads, together with their surface areas in metres squared or other appropriate units, that
i) have been fully resurfaced
ii) have not been resurfaced at all
and iii) have been only partially resurfaced.
In the case of iii) please state what percentage of each road has been resurfaced to-date.

In the case of Pavements please supply a list following the above requirement, with the exception of surface area which is not needed; if the lengths of Pavements is available (in metres or other appropriate units) please supply that instead.

As street names are not unique throughout Sheffield (e.g. "New Road") please ensure that a postcode or similar geographical indicator is supplied so that all roads can be unambiguously identified.

I trust this information is readily available for you to provide to me. If there are specific problems please let me know so that we can discuss what can be provided.

Yours faithfully,

Janet Elsden

FOI, Sheffield City Council

Dear Janet Elsden,

Thank you for your recent request for information relating to Road and pavement resurfacing work carried out since 2012 which we received on 19/08/2019.

This has been logged as a Freedom of Information Request, and will be dealt with under the Freedom of Information Act. The reference number for your request can be found above.

The Freedom of Information Act states that we must respond to you within 20 working days, therefore, you should expect to hear a response from us by 18/09/2019.

In the meantime, if you have any queries please, contact us at the email address below.

Thank you.

Yours sincerely,

Sheffield City Council
PO Box 1283
Sheffield, S1 1UJ
Email: [Sheffield City Council request email]
 Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to

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FOI, Sheffield City Council

Link: [1]File-List

Dear Janet Elsden,

 

Thank you for your recent request for information relating to Road and
pavement resurfacing work carried out since 2012 which we received on
19/08/2019.

 

Please find below, Sheffield City Council’s response to your request:

 

Exception applied: Why does it apply?

Regulation 12(4)(b) of the The cost of complying with the request, in
Environmental Information addition to the breadth of the scope of the
Regulations 2004: the request information requested, means that it would
for information is manifestly be manifestly unreasonable to provide the
unreasonable information.
Regulation 12(1)(b) of the Environmental Information Regulations 2004
requires us to carry out a public interest test where an exception to
disclosure applies under Regulation 12(4) or Regulation 12(5). More
information on Public Interest Tests can be found on the Information
Commissioner’s Office website: click – [2]here.
Factors in favour of Factors in favour of refusing to disclose
disclosing the information: the information:
·         It supports the ·         The information requested relates
transparency agenda making it to every road and every footway within the
clear how local authorities Sheffield City boundary and requires an
deliver services, spend money analysis of the extent of the resurfacing
and make decisions work (if any) carried out on each road or
pavement. The request also requires the data
  to be provided with an identifier (such as
the postcodes for that area of
road/pavement). This is a broad request
asking for a highly detailed level of
information, and the Council considers that
the nature of the request, which asks for a
highly granular level of detail, means that
it would be manifestly unreasonable to
provide this information.

·         While the Council acknowledges
that there is a public interest in finding
out what road resurfacing work has been
carried out, the Council considers that
there is little value to the public in
information at this level of detail being
made available. Statistics about the total
mileage of street resurfacing and pavement
resurfacing are already made available on
our website at the following link
[3]https://www.sheffield.gov.uk/streetsahead
and the Council believes that this level of
detail is enough to satisfy the public
interest in this area.

·         Our records are not held in such a
way to enable this data to be provided
without extensive and manual work, which we
estimate would take in excess of 90 hours.
Public Interest Decision:

On balance, we believe it is in the public interest not to disclose this
information because of the nature of the request, the limited public
interest in providing this information at such a high level of detail, and
the excessive costs of compliance.

 

If you have any queries about this response, please do not hesitate to
contact us.

 

If you are unhappy with the response you have received in relation to your
request, you are entitled to have this reviewed.  You can ask for an
internal review by either writing to the above address or by emailing
[4][Sheffield City Council request email].  Internal review requests should be submitted
within 40 working days from the date of this response.

 

If you remain dissatisfied with the outcome of your internal review, you
can contact the Information Commissioners Office. The Information
Commissioner can be contacted at: The Information Commissioner's Office,
Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF, telephone 0303
123 1113, or for further details see their website [5]www.ico.org.uk

 

Kind Regards,

 

Sheffield City Council

PO Box 1283

Sheffield, S1 1UJ

Email: [6][Sheffield City Council request email]

P Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to

 

 

 

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Dear Sheffield City Council,

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

I am writing to request an internal review of Sheffield City Council's handling of my FOI request 'Details of Roads and Pavements resurfaced under Streets Ahead'.

As this request has been refused, largely, it seems, following a misinterpretation by you of what was actually being asked for, I am replying, within the 40 working days limit, to ask for an Internal Review.

Before moving on to the main body of this response, I make two observations on your reply.
Firstly, it is disappointing that you have not followed my suggestion that, in the first instance, you contact me to discuss any specific problems with providing the data I have requested. Had you done so, your misunderstanding of part of the request would most likely have become quickly apparent.
Secondly, a key part of your response, much of the paragraph commencing "It supports the...", is completely garbled and utterly unintelligible. It epitomises the careless and dismissive way you have handled this reasonable request. Only one of the links you've provided actually works.

As far as I can discern, your principal reason for dismissal is your interpretation that my asking for "a postcode or similar geographical indicator... so that all roads can be unambiguously identified" is a request for "a highly granular level of detail". In fact I am only asking for numbers at the fairly coarse road-by-road level. A proper reading of that entire sentence would make clear that I have only asked for "postcode or similar geographical indicator" as a disambiguation for roads within Sheffield that have identical names. I gave an example that I know of, "New Road" (there may well be others): there are at least 5 New Roads in Sheffield. So if in the listing you supply you can state whether the particular New Road is in "S6" (alternatively "near Low Bradfield") or "S36" (alternatively "adjacent to Broomhead Reservoir") then that will enable me to distinguish which of the roads is being referred to. In the works programme there must have been some discriminator to allow the road crews to find the correct road to work on.
To be clear: it is only for those roads with identical names that I require this small amount of further information, though if the postal district and/or ward can be easily provided for all roads then that would be appreciated.

Moving on to any more general rejection of providing information at a road-by-road level, I will point out that you have already supplied similar information in response to a FoI request made by MJ Keane on 28th June 2017: https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/l...
The information I am asking for is an update on that data, with the addition of similar pavement data and a request that roads/pavements which have yet to be resurfaced (or only partly so) are accounted for explicity. I have also asked for the road data to be given in terms of surface area rather than length; evidence that you already have access to the data in that format is provided in this link, where the overall area of roads resurfaced in Sheffield is quoted in terms of equivalent football pitch areas: https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/200-footb...
Overall, then, this is not a request that entails a substantial change in the type, or increase in the volume, of information that you have previously provided.

I am glad that you "acknowledge that there is a public interest in finding out what road resurfacing work has been carried out." I disagree with you profoundly, however, where you state that there is little value for the public in having data at the level of detail that I have requested; I hope that attitude has arisen purely as a result of your misapprehension that I was asking for "highly granular" data.
Indeed, as funders and beneficiaries of a £2.2 billion contract, the public in Sheffield have every right to know specifically which roads and pavements are being stated to have been resurfaced, both in a citizen's immediate locale and throughout the whole city, and to be able to monitor for themselves the degree to which this is true.

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

Yours faithfully,

Janet Elsden

FOI, Sheffield City Council

Link: [1]File-List

Dear Janet Elsden

 

Thank you for your recent request for an internal review relating to Road
and pavement resurfacing work carried out since 2012 which we received on
24/10/2019. We are sorry to hear that you are not happy with your
response.

 

This has now been logged and will be carried out by a member of the team

 

You should expect to hear a response from us by 24/11/2019.

 

In the meantime, if you have any queries please, contact us at the email
address below.

 

Thank you.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

Sheffield City Council

PO Box 1283

Sheffield, S1 1UJ

Email: [2][Sheffield City Council request email]

P Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to

 

 

 

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Dear FOI,

The internal review of my request was due to have been completed by 24th November, so as of this Sunday it will be 4 weeks overdue.

I would be grateful for you attention to this matter.

Yours sincerely,

Janet Elsden

FOI, Sheffield City Council

Dear Ms Elsden

Please accept our apologies for the delay in carrying out your internal review. Unfortunately, we currently have a small backlog of internal reviews which officers have not managed to carry out. Please be assured that we will carry out an internal review of your request as promised but this is likely to be in the New Year.

Again, please accept our apologies for the delay.

Kind regards

Robert Jackson
Access to Information Officer
Information Management Team
Business Change and Information Solutions (BCIS)
Resources Portfolio
Sheffield City Council
PO Box 1283, Sheffield S1 1UJ
0114 273 4906
[Sheffield City Council request email]
www.sheffield.gov.uk

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FOI, Sheffield City Council

1 Attachment

Dear Ms Elsden

Please find attached a copy of our response to your request for internal review. Please accept our apologies again for the delay.

Kind regards

Robert Jackson
Access to Information Officer
Information Management Team
Business Change and Information Solutions
Resources Portfolio
Sheffield City Council

Email: [email address]; [Sheffield City Council request email];
[email address]; [email address]

Postal Address: Sheffield City Council, PO Box 1283 Sheffield S1 1UJ

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