Please provide copies, suitably redacted, of any letters sent out to householders in East Devon in 2022, warning them of damage to footpaths caused by tree roots emanating from their property.
Devon County Council (DCC) believes this request is manifestly unreasonable under Regulation 12 (4) of the Environmental Information Regulations (EIR).
We do not log the subject matter of the letters we send out so we would need to search
for all letters, then attempt to narrow them down by area, then read each one for
references to tree roots. Neighbourhood Teams deal with over 10,000 customer contacts per annum, and we estimate that, of these, 1,200 contacts per annum relate to East Devon. If we estimate that it would take 5 minutes per contact to establish the nature of the letter and then to extract information relating to tree roots, it would take at least 100 hours to carry out this work.
We believe in the value of openness and transparency, but we do not believe it is in the publics best interests to divert our staff resources from their core functions for the prolonged period of time it would take to answer this request.
For your information, our enquiries have not resulted in any service area being aware of letters of this type being sent out to properties in 2022.