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 can you provide me with the number of recorded crimes for ‘Production of cannabis’ (Home Office code 92/21) and 'Permitting premises to be used' (Home Office code 93/21) between 2015 and 2020.
Can you break down the data in the following way please:
2. The year;
3. Description of what was seized;
4. Estimated value of the seizure.
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested is not already held statistically, nor is it held in a format that would allow its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold. Each year there are approximately 300 offences recorded as Cultivation of a cannabis plant and Permitting premises to be used for unlawful purposes. Each of these cases would require a manual review to establish a response to your request. Even at a conservative estimate of 2 hours per case, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract the information to provide a response to points 3 & 4 particularly, and for just a one year period, would take over 600 hours. As such 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.
As part of your request would exceed the prescribed limit, as defined by the Act, there is no requirement for Northumbria Police to provide a response to the remaining parts of your request. However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be question 1 broken down by year.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
