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Sex offenders - 731/19

Date Responded 02 July 2019

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. How many registered sex offenders are being monitored in the force area?
  2. How many of these have a lifetime notification?
  3. For the following time periods how many people who have a lifetime notification on the Sex Offenders Register have applied to have it revoked? - Please supply figures for 2019 to date, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014
  4. How many of these applications were successful? -Please supply figures for 2019 to date, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014

In Response:

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, particularly at point 2 is not held statistically nor is it held in a format that allows its extraction within the 18 hour threshold.  Approximately 2000 records would require a manual review to establish how many had a lifetime notification.  Even at a conservative estimate of 6 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 200 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.

I can advise that the MAPPA reports are published on the Northumbria Police website and the remainder of your questions can be answered therein, or when the next reports are published.

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.

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