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. Please disclose how many payments the force made to informants who are convicted sex offenders between January 1 2005 and April 19 2018.
2. For each payment, please disclose the nature of the case (i.e. rape investigation, child grooming investigation, theft investigation etc)
3. For each payment, please disclose exactly how much the payment was for.
4. For each payment, please disclose if the investigation it was made for resulted in charges brought.
5. If charges were brought, please disclose if hey were convicted.”
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within 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.
The information requested is not already held statistically and to extract the information at point 1 alone in response to this FOI request would far exceed the permitted time constraints. Further time would then be required to establish a response to points 2-5. This could only be achieved by the cross referencing of records and data bases, and again these points would far exceed the permitted 18 hours. As we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 18 hours, 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.
I can advise that information regarding one such instance regarding Operation Sanctuary was widely reported via various press releases, and is copied below for your information .
Additionally had Section 12 not been fully applicable, relevant exemptions would have been applied to neither confirm nor deny any other information is held, namely
S23(5) Information supplied by, or concerning, certain Security Bodies
S24(2) National Security
S30(3) Investigations and Proceedings Conducted by Public Authorities
S31(3) Law Enforcement
