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:
For the calendar years 2015 to 2018 inclusive and by year
- How many incidents have been reported of dogs worrying livestock
- Locations, by Area Command level, of these incidents?
- In those incidents, how many livestock deaths were recorded
- In those incidents how many livestock injuries were recorded ?
- In those incidents how many dogs were shot?
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
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.
The information requested is not held in a format that allows its extraction within the specified 18 hour threshold.
Initial searches were made for all incidents with a closing code matching the following.
BL1 Animal Related
QA9 Wildlife Related
SM0 Wildlife (Public safety & Welfare)
SM1 Animal
SP1 Pets & Domesticated Animals
This was then narrowed down to the time period specified in your request, and then further filtered to show only those that included:
Dog
Cow
Sheep
Pig
Livestock
Goat
Lamb
Calf
Chicken
Fowl
This brought back in excess of 4600 returns, each of which would need to be manually reviewed to see which, if any, met the criteria of this request at point 1. This cannot be achieved within 18 hours, and has been estimated to exceed 230 hours. Further time would then be required to answer points 2-5. Section 12 is therefore appropriate.
