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:
For the last five years (01/01/2014 to 01/01/2019), please provide the following information. Please provide the answers separately for each year.
- How many reports of sexual assault and sexual harassment were there?
- Of these how many of the victims were students?
- What were the outcomes of the report?
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested is not held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold. There is no standalone offence code for sexual harassment, and accordingly each recorded harassment incident would need to be manually reviewed to establish if there was a sexual element to the offence. This exercise cannot be achieved within the 18 hours. We also cannot accurately establish if the victim was a student within the time constraints. Again each report would need to be reviewed to establish if the victim was a student at the time the offence was recorded. As we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 18 hours, 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 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:
- How many reports of ‘sexual assault’ and ‘harassment’ were there?
- What were the outcomes?
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
