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:
In the time period, 1st January 2000*, to 31st December 2020 (inclusive of these dates), can you please provide monthly counts of the following:
- Members of currently employed staff who having completed a management vetting form (or similar internal vetting form), subsequently went on to have a vetting interview based on the data supplied.
- Members of currently employed staff who following the completion of the form (as detailed above) or interview, were arrested because of the information supplied.
- The outcome of the arrest (Acquitted / NFA / Prosecuted/ etc)
* If the force does not retain the information this far back, please list from the earliest month possible
In Response:
The information requested is not recorded electronically nor in an easily searchable format, and to establish a response would require approximately 1496 records to be located and manually reviewed. Even at a conservative estimate of 20 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 498 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.
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.
