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:
I would like to know the costs of policing at Newcastle United matches at St James Park in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. I would also appreciate these figures for Sunderland matches at the Stadium of Light if possible as well for the same time scales.
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 Finance Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police.
I am able to disclose the located information to you as follows with the below noted.
We do not hold the total cost of policing football matches. Work by officers and staff will have been undertaken as part of their duties and these normal hour costs are not recorded for the purpose of Football matches. The information we do hold is the amount invoiced to clubs in financial years. Clubs are invoiced in accordance with the National Police Chief’s Council’s “National Policing Guidelines on Charging for Police Services.
With regards to the years 2018/19 and 2019/20:
As the information you have requested is accessible by other means I have not provided you with a copy of the information and will rely on Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. You should therefore consider this a refusal for these parts of your request.
I have provided an explanation to this exemption below.
Section 21 (1) - Information accessible by other means
Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant is exempt information.
This information is already published on the Northumbria Police Disclosure Log. It is therefore already freely available. FOI 1335/20 refers and the link to the Log can be found below.
With regards to the remaining years I respond as follows.
- 2022/23 data is supplied as of 31 January 2023
|
Club |
2020/21 |
2021/22 |
2022/23 |
|
NUFC |
£0 |
£245,479 |
£167,737 |
|
SAFC |
£0 |
£164,213 |
£172,644 |
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
