Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')
As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held at the time of a request, by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.
You asked:
1. Please disclose, since the start of March 2020, how many serving officers or police staff have been investigated/fined for breaches of the coronavirus legislation. For each instance, please disclose.
2. Their role (police staff, officer, detective etc)
3. A summary of the allegation against them (i.e. a police staff member was fined after they were found inside a property with three other households)
4. If they were fined, and if so, how much
5. If the case had been passed to Professional Standards for an internal investigation
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
As advised in our acknowledgement email this request has been aggregated with your previous requests (FOI’s 1909/20, 43/21 and 114/21) with regards to time constraints under the Act, as they refer to the same subject area – Covid, and also with all being received within 60 working days of each other.
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with both the Fixed Penalty Unit and the Professional Standards Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police.
I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.
With regards to police officers, at points 1-4 I respond as follows:
As the information you have requested is accessible by other means I have not provided you with a copy of the information and will rely on Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. You should therefore consider this a refusal for your request.
I have provided an explanation to this exemption below.
Section 21 (1) - Information accessible by other means
Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant is exempt information.
This information has been asked for previously, released and is published on the Northumbria Police Disclosure Log, FOI 243/21 refers and the link to the Log is below. This answers point 1-4
With regards to information regarding police staff:
2. 1 x PCSO
3. Meeting with a person from another household
4. £100
5. All four have been recorded and were addressed via Practice Requiring Improvement via the Reflective Practice Review Process.
