Supplier Invoices Payment – 953/23

Date Responded 17 July 2023

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 period between June 2022 and January 2023, please provide the statistics as follows:

1. The average number of days taken to make payments of invoices, measured from the date of receipt of invoice or other notice to the date the cash is received by the supplier

2. The percentage of payments made within the reporting period which were paid in 30 days or fewer, between 31 and 60 days, and in 61 days or longer

3. The percentage of payments due within the reporting period which were not paid within the agreed payment period.

In Response:

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.

1 and 2.

Information at points 1 and 2 is not held, this is not recorded information.

The information you have requested at this point is accessible by other means and 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 consider this to be a refusal notice under Section 17 of the Act for 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.

The information you have requested can be calculated from information published on the Northumbria Police website. The information is freely available here: Transparency reporting : Northumbria Police.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.

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.