Abortion Related Crimes - 941/22

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:

I am writing to submit a request under the Freedom of Information Act for data on abortion-related crimes recorded by the police force between 1 March 2014 to 31 March 2022.

1. Please tell me how many females were investigated for abortion-related crimes under the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act during this time.  For each of these crimes I would also like the following specific information provided:
2. The subsection of the Act the female was investigated under ie: a) Administering drugs or using instruments to procure an abortion, or b) Procuring drugs/instruments to cause an abortion
3. Whether the female suspect was the pregnant party, and was thus investigated on suspicion of procuring or attempting to procure her own abortion
4. The ethnicity of the suspect
5. The age of the suspect
6. The month and year the offence was recorded
7. The outcome recorded (including no outcome recorded, where relevant)
8. I would also like data on how many females were investigated for intentional destruction of a viable unborn child under the 1929 Infant Life (Preservation) Act. For these crimes, please tell me:
9. Whether the female suspect was the pregnant party, and was thus investigated on suspicion of destroying her own child
10. The ethnicity of the suspect
11. The age of the suspect
12. The month and year the offence was recorded
13. The outcome recorded (including no outcome recorded, where relevant)

In Response:

We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.

Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidelines state that:

A public authority must confirm or deny whether it holds the information requested unless the cost of this alone would exceed the appropriate limit.

I can neither confirm nor deny that the information you require is held by Northumbria Police as to actually determine if it is held would exceed the permitted 18 hours therefore Section 12(2) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply. This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00

You should consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for your request.

I have set out the reasons for this below.

The information requested is not already held statistically nor is it held in a format that would allow the locating and extraction of data back to 2014 within the permitted 18 hour threshold.  To do so would involve the interrogation of different recording systems used within the time frames requested and this has been assessed as exceeding the 18 hour threshold. As such Section 12 is relevant.

However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be questions from 2017 onwards.

If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.

 

You should note that exemptions may be applied to withhold some of the data requested should it be deemed necessary to do so.