Building Safety Incidents - Freedom of information requests
Title or Description
Building Safety Incidents
FOI Number
215
Date Received
22/02/2022
Type of Request
EIR
Request or Question
Could I please request the following under Freedom of Information legislation: 1) The number of building safety incidents reported in (i) primary schools in your local area, (ii) secondary schools in your local area, (iii) early learning and childcare establishments in your local area. Building safety incidents can mean, but is not limited to, roof tiles falling, shelves collapsing, walls crumbling, or door falling off its hinges.
2) Can this information be from the timeline of (i) 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2019, (ii) 1 January 2019 to 31 December 2019, (iii) 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2020, (iv) 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2021, (v) 1 January 2022 to 20 February 2022.
3) Furthermore, if any child, staff member or parent/guardian was injured in the above dates due to building safety incidents.
Response
1) Building Standards Enforcement cases in relation to defective and dangerous building cases are available from our on line portal.
2) If you use the advanced search facility, cases can be searched for in the date ranges specified.
3) Scottish Borders Council has considered your request and concluded that to respond would place an unreasonable burden of the service concerned. Under 10(4)(b) of EI(S)R 2004 Scottish Borders Council is not obliged to comply with a request that is considered to be manifestly unreasonable.
All incidents are reported to H and S however there this is not a category of incident in our record system so will be exceedingly difficult to respond to. It would require reading each and every incident record on the system for these buildings to identify if it was a building issue which would take weeks.
We also asked schools directly however they use the same reporting system as our Health and Safety Department, as above they were unable to respond.
Therefore Scottish Borders Council is refusing your request.
We appreciate that this will be disappointing to you. We would be pleased to discuss whether your request could be changed, to bring down the cost of providing the information and allow us to respond. Please contact the Information Management Team to discuss options.
