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 would like to request the following data, broken out by calendar year (and local authority location if possible), for the past 10 years starting with 2022 if available:
- The number of drivers with ongoing driving disqualifications who have been caught still driving (by local authority area).
- The number of drivers caught driving dangerously (according to police definition) (by local authority area).
- The number of drivers caught parking dangerously (either by obstruction or by another suitable equivalent measure) (by local authority area).
- The number of drivers caught driving without valid insurance (by local authority area).
- The number of drivers caught failing to stop after an accident (by local authority area).
- The number of drivers caught failing to report an accident (by local authority area).
- All of the above who have been convicted as a result.
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.
To provide information which meets the criteria of your request, at question 7 alone, would entail a member of staff manually searching over 1,328 records for dangerous driving to ascertain the number which resulted in a charge/summons/postal requisition (i.e. cases that might result in a conviction). Even at a conservative estimate of 2 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 44 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.
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 if you dramatically shortened the date range for all questions or resubmitted questions 1–6 only.
It should also be noted that most of the offences listed in your request are non-notifiable offences which means the information we can supply is very limited, notably we would not be able to break these down by LA area and would only be able to supply force level data.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
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.
