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:
- The number of reports that schools in the area have made to the police about anti-vaccination protests inside or just outside the school between September 2020-November 2021.
- Ideally I would like a monthly breakdown of the information for the last academic year (Sept 2020 - August 2021) as well as the current academic year (Sept 2021 - November 2021).
- The nature of each incident, whether it was inside or outside the school, and whether police attended the incident.
- What action was taken (for example how many arrests or cautions) as a result of the reports. If action was taken, please can you provide a breakdown of what the action related to.
- Please can you also set out the number of times that schools have contacted police over threatening communications relating to Covid-19 vaccines being offered at their school in this period - and what action (if any) was taken.
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
To provide information which meets the criteria of your request would entail a member of staff manually searching over 656 records which contain the word “school” in the address or premises type, the MO states school, Covid, Covid 19, Corona, Vax, Vaccine to ascertain which met the specifics of your request. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 32.8 hours, therefore 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.
