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. a) I would like to request the number of LGBTQ+ victims of homicide since 2016
1. b) If you could provide the name of each victim
1. c) the date it occurred
1. d) where the homicides took place in each instance.
2. I would like to request the how many of these homicides are solved and how many remain unsolved.
3. If you could provide the rates of prosecution and conviction for those murders that were solved as well as the timeframe between discovery of the body and charges being brought.
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development and Crime Departments of Northumbria Police. I can neither confirm or deny that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police for the following reasons.
Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidelines state that:
A public authority must confirm or deny whether it holds the information requested unless the cost of this alone would exceed the appropriate limit.
I can neither confirm nor deny that the information you require is held by Northumbria Police as to actually determine if it is held would exceed the permitted 18 hours therefore Section 12(2) 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.
I have set out the reasons for this below.
We do not record any LGBTQ+ details in our records, so we would need to manually look into each case, of which there are in excess of 80 records, to try and establish if it is recorded anywhere that the victim was LGBTQ+. Even at a conservative estimate of 20 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 26 hours, therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act would apply.
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.
