Corona Arrests/Fines - 580/20

Date Responded 28 April 2020

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:

Between 23 March and 5th April (two-week period only) could you provide the number of arrests/cautions/fines which have been carried out by your police force in relation to Covid 19 measures being breached?

Could the number for each be provided separately? ie

Arrests: X

Cautions: X

Fines: X

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police.

I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows.

As the information you have requested with regards to the number of fines issued is accessible by other means we 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.

We 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 is freely available via a search of the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) website. The NPCC publish national statistics, every two weeks, broken down to Force level for the number of fines issued for breaches of government public health regulations. In order to aid and assist your further we have provided links below to the NPCC website for the news regarding these statistics and the data table. We would ask that you take into account the information relayed in both of the links:

https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/police-chiefs-keep-reporting-crime-to-us-during-coronavirus-outbreak-we-are-still-here-for-you

https://cdn.prgloo.com/media/1b5704836f564b04a937301aa90c4daa.png?width=640&height=960

Please note that this information will not be broken down any further, or provided in any other format .

With regards to arrests/cautions, no information held. There have been no such instances.

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.