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 employees of your force that have a restraining order, protection from harassment order or non-molestation order against them, live as of today
And for each of these employees:
2, Their role and rank (e.g. "officer - sergeant" or "civilian - researcher")
3, The type of order against them
4, How long the order has been in place
5, Whether any misconduct and/or criminal case was opened into them relating to the order
6, If applicable: the outcome of any misconduct or criminal case (please state the misconduct and criminal outcomes separately)
Please leave out any information that would take this above the cost threshold or that you can't give due to privacy.
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.
There are no facilities on recording systems that would allow searches to be made to establish a response to this request within the permitted time constraints. A manual review of several data bases would be required to attempt to provide a response, and this has been estimated as far exceeding the 18 hour threshold. Section 12(2) is therefore applicable.
You should note however that had Section 12 not been appropriate, other exemptions would have be considered as relevant.
