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. what was the estimated cost to the force of the Queen's funeral, if any
2. what types of activity relating to the funeral resulted in a cost to the force, and how much did each activity cost - please present this as a breakdown to question 1, eg staffing costs, accommodation, catering, transport etc
I would like data concerning all activities associated with the funeral proceedings - for instance, the Queen lying in state, transporting the Queen's coffin, the actual funeral procession etc.
If including staffing costs, please give me a breakdown of what would be a cost that the force would normally expect to have had (for instance police officers already scheduled to work who were deployed to activities related to the funeral, ie opportunity costs) versus additional costs eg from deploying more officers than would be usual.
Further clarification: I am primarily interested in the cost burden to your specific force - what you may describe as non-recoverable spend. However, if you have expenditure that was recovered, I would ask for you to provide two figures for each question/cost breakdown - a total expenditure and a total non-recoverable expenditure.
I would for instance want to differentiate between expenditure that was recovered from another public body eg if London Metropolitan Police covered the cost of any assistance provided to Avon and Somerset. An FOI has also been sent to London Metropolitan about their costs.
In Response:
1. The force does not separately record or allocate normal hours and costs to specific activities. Only overtime hours specifically allocated to the funeral proceedings and additional bank holiday hours would be costed and allocated. Total associated overtime officer costs was £295,990, which included the cost of the additional bank holiday. Mutual Aid costs provided to the Metropolitan Police were recharged to the sum of £567,635.
2. No information held. Officers on Mutual Aid are solely under the direction of the host force. You should note that had information been held at this point that exemptions would have been applied to withhold.
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.
