FOI Request - Review of 101003854268 Road Safety

Request 101003881107

Review of 101003854268 Road Safety

I am writing to request an Internal Review of the Council’s response to my Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 request, reference 101003854268.

My original request (item 4) asked for:

“A summary of the economic cost of those reported road traffic collisions to Moray Council.”

The response referred me to published reports and data describing the cost to the economy and cost to the community, along with an explanation of the differences between these terms. However, my question is specifically related to the economic cost to Moray Council itself — i.e. any costs incurred directly by the Council, such as road or infrastructure repairs, legal or insurance costs, or other expenditure arising from road traffic collisions.

The response did not clarify whether the Council actually holds any information relating to these direct costs. I would therefore be grateful if, upon review, you could:

Confirm whether Moray Council holds any information on the financial or economic costs to the Council resulting from road traffic collisions; and

If such information is held, please provide it (or a summary of it); or

If the Council does not hold this information, please confirm this explicitly under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002.

Response 04-12-2025

Following your request for a review (our ref: 101003881107) of your Freedom of Information (FOI) Request – Road Safety (our ref: 101003854268) - a review meeting was held on 21st November 2025. In attendance were the Information Governance Manager and Data Protection Officer; Service Manager - Transportation; Solicitor; and Information Co-ordinator.

Your FOI Request (101003854268) from 15th September 2025 was discussed.

With regard to question 4, we had been trying to be helpful in our original response by providing data that is published and available elsewhere. In your review request you asked specifically for the economic cost to the Moray Council. This is not straightforward to determine, as there are a number of factors that need to be taken into account, including:
• that it will be the police will be aware of significant collisions within Moray. The Police do provide that data to us, once it has been validated; however, it is likely that this information is not complete.
• With regard to collisions; some collisions could have been reported to the Moray Council directly, for these we would have to check each case individually to ascertain costs. We can confirm that there have been on average of 53 collisions within Moray each year since 2017.  However, to attempt to find and collate details on ‘costs incurred directly by the Council, such as road or infrastructure repairs, legal or insurance costs, or other expenditure arising from road traffic collisions’, assuming checking each case were to take a minimum of ten minutes, this would take more than 40 hours and would therefore cost the Council in excess of £600 of staff time. In accordance with Section 12 of the Freedom of Information (Scotland) Act 2002 (excessive cost), we are therefore unable to comply with this part of the request.

In order to be helpful please see information published by the Department of Transport (DfT) that you might find useful:

Road safety statistics: interactive data tools - GOV.UK to be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/road-safety-statistics-data-tools – Open data source for Collision data from Police provided to DfT.

Road safety statistics: data tables - GOV.UK to be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/reported-road-accidents-vehicles-and-casualties-tables-for-great-britain#other-road-safety-data-ras40

– Data tables compiled by DfT, specifically
Cost of preventing collisions
RAS4001: Average and total value of prevention of collisions to be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/reported-road-accidents-vehicles-and-casualties-tables-for-great-britain#other-road-safety-data-ras40

TAG data book - GOV.UK – A detailed data book compiled by DfT to help appraisal of schemes to be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/tag-data-book
Includes datasets on:
Average value of prevention per casualty by severity and element of cost
Average value of prevention per road casualty by class of road user
Average value of prevention of road accidents by severity and element of cost
Average value of prevention per road accident by severity & class of road: all hours