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:
Please could you answer the following questions on Section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 – For each of the calendar years:
a 2016
b 2017
c 2018
d 2019
e 2020 to date
- Please can you tell me how many reports of controlling or coercive behaviour were made under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 to officers
- Please can you tell me how many arrests under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (controlling or coercive behaviour) were made by your officers
- Please can you give me the outcomes (charged, not in public interest etc) of the arrests / offences committed identified in the answers to Q1a-c
- Can you tell me the number of referrals to the CPS by your force for a prosecution under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 were rejected/not taken forward by the CPS for the calendar years (by this I mean cases brought to the CPS by your police force that is not taken to prosecution for whatever reason eg lack of evidence etc):
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development and Criminal Justice Departments of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested is not held centrally nor is it held in a format that would allow its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold.
Point 4 would require in excess of 1400 cases to be manually reviewed to establish a response to that part alone. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to locate and extract this information alone would take over 70 hours, therefore Section 12(1) 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.
When applying Section 12 exemption our duty to assist under As part of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a response to the remaining parts of your request. 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 the remaining questions.
If this would be useful, you may wish to remove point 4 and resubmit your request accordingly.
