Please provide all email threads sent to and from the highway management traffic order regarding the Exmouth residents parking scheme as well as those sent to and from any councillor involved regarding the scheme.
Devon County Council believes 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.
To respond to this request we would need to search the Highways team mailbox, individual mailboxes of multiple highways staff and Councillors mailboxes. The Highways team have approximately 50,000 emails in the highway management traffic orders mailbox and whilst they can search for key words, it brings up a large number of results. For example, a search for “Exmouth Parking” brings up 1226 emails alone that need to be individually checked, to confirm whether or not they are relevant. For example, we would need to exclude residents in Exmouth commenting on residents parking in Topsham. We estimate this could take on average, 5 minutes per email, depending on the size and complexity of each document. In addition, we would need officers to search their personal mailboxes for correspondence with Councillors which would need to be individually checked for relevance in the same way. We would also need to conduct a search of the mailboxes of each Councillor to ensure we capture all the information, (for example, if a resident emailed them directly). And again each email would checking for relevance. All of this would take well in excess of the 18 hour appropriate cost limit, and as such we are unable to provide the information requested.