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:
Please find below my FOI requests that are for the past 5 calendar years (with the figures being broken down for each year) and apply only to sexual offences of disabled individuals (with the figures being broken down if possible re: if the offences took place when the individual was a child or an adult):
1. Number of allegations per year
2. Number of charges placed per year
3. Number of convictions per year
It would be helpful to have a breakdown of the disabilities if possible.
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidelines state that:
A public authority must confirm or deny whether it holds the information requested unless the cost of this alone would exceed the appropriate limit.
I can neither confirm nor deny that the information you require is held by Northumbria Police as to actually determine if it is held would exceed the permitted 18 hours therefore Section 12(2) 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 have set out the reasons for this below.
There is no accurate way to establish a response to this specific submission within the permitted 18 hour threshold. The only reliable method would be to manually review all recorded sexual offences within the time period requested to establish if the victim had been recorded as disabled. This would require in excess of 19300 sexual offence crimes to be reviewed. 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 965 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. Further time would then be required to establish a response to the remaining questions, ie the individual was a child or an adult, the number of charges placed per year, the number of convictions per year and the breakdown of the disabilities.
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.
