E-scooters - 194/22

Date Responded 22 February 2022

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. The number of reported accidents involving e-scooters
  2. The number of reported causalities in accidents involving e-scooters
  3. The number and total value of fines given out for e-scooter related offences
  4. The number of instances driving licence penalty points have been given out for e-scooter related offences (if known)
  5. The number of instances of a driving licence being revoked for e-scooter related offences (if known)
  6. The number of instances that an e-scooter has been confiscated for an illegal offence
  7. Any specific locations (streets / postcodes) where the most e-scooter related accidents or offences have been reported

 

When we sought clarification of your request you provided us with the following information:

In regards to the date range, I’d like to request data from 01.01.21 – 01.02.22.

 

For the term accidents, I refer to road traffic collisions.

For the term offences, I refer to any fines whereby the riders use of or behaviour on was considered to be illegal - this does not include thefts.

For the term illegal offences, I refer to any instances whereby the riders use of or behaviour on was considered to be illegal - this does not include thefts.

In Response:

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.

 

To provide information which meets the criteria of your request, would entail a member of staff manually searching over 469 incidents which were found following a free-text search on a central database for "escooter", "e scooter" and "e-scooter". Even at a conservative estimate of 8 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to locate, extract and compile this information would take over 62 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 Section 16 of the Act would normally entail that we contact you to determine whether it is possible to refine the scope of your request to bring it within the cost limits. However, from the information we have outlined above I see no reasonable way in which we can do so.

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.

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