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:
Following the introduction of an active risk management system and individual risk management plans for registered sex offenders please advise :
- How many home visits were carried out for each "high risk" offender in the last year?
- How many high-risk offenders were re assessed and re-evaluated as low risk in the last year?
- How many of offenders were consistently assessed as low risk and no longer receive home visits?
- How many registered sex offenders have failed to make annual contact with police stations?
- How long does it take for a registered sex offender to be considered as "missing" from the constabulary area?
- How many registered sex offenders are missing from the constabulary are over the last three years?
After we sought clarity you defined the time periods as:
Points 1 and 2 ‘Last year’ would be 8.10.18 to 8.10.19
Points 2 and 3 - I know that the active risk management system was introduced from 2017 so I presume there would only be data from them in relation so from 2017 until 2019 .
Point 6 ‘Last 3 years’ would be 8.10.16 to 8.10.19
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Safeguarding 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.
The information requested is not held statistically and is not held in a format that would allow its extraction within the permitted 18 hour time constraints. This is particularly relevant at points 1, 2, 4. To establish a response at point 2 alone would require in excess of 1,600 records to be located and manually reviewed to establish how many met the criteria of your request at this point. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 - 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take between 80 – 133 hours. Points 1 and 2 would also exceed the 18 hours in their own right, 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.
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 for points 3 and 5 above. We may also be able to provide a response for point 6 – however it should be noted that the data would be based on the day of the request as we are unable to provide historic information for this point.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
