Please provide copies of all emails relating to the on-street parking pay and display proposals in Tavistock, whether referencing Tavistock by name, or wider discussions about the proposals across Devon.
Compliance with this request would exceed the appropriate cost limit under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 which is £450 or 18 hours of officer time. In order to locate and retrieve the requested information, searches would be required of 8 email inboxes of staff in the traffic management team, as well as their team manager, senior managers up to Director level, plus elected Members for each area, portfolio holder and leader. As there is not a specific search phrase to reliably pick up all exchanges, each of those people would need to conduct searches using the following terms: “parking”, “Traffic Regulation Order” “pay and display” “proposal”, “Braunton”, “Crediton”, “Dartmouth”, “Honiton”, “Okehampton”, “Salcombe” and “Sidmouth”. Once these hundreds of email results are found, a manual check of each of these results would be required, to check for relevance. For example, a search using the term “parking” will yield results relating to parking subjects such as enforcement or waiting restrictions across Devon. A search using the term “Tavistock” will yield results relating to other community matters such as maintenance or speed limits. If an email within scope did not contain those search terms, it would not be retrieved, therefore even after all of those efforts, the Council could not guarantee that all of the requested emails had been found.
Under the Act, there is a duty to provide advice and assistance as to how a request can be refined to fit within the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the way the data is held, this is not possible for this request.
For details of the cabinet meeting in which the decision was made to cancel this scheme, please visit the Democracy Devon website and view the Cabinet meeting minutes from 13th March 2024.