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 send me:
A list of the force's cold cases under investigation including details of the crime investigated for the period 2015 to 2020 (to date)
A list of cold cases solved since January 2019
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Crime Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested is not held in a format that would allow us to locate and extract within the permitted 18 hour threshold and has been estimated as far exceeding that limit. As such 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.
However, in order to provide you with some assistance, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, an initial assessment of the information that may be provided within the time constraints would be questions as asked but limited to one offence only – ie murder - however you should note that this may also attract relevant exemptions to withhold information not for release into the public domain.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly. You should note that we still cannot guarantee that any resubmission would not attract S12 for a second time. This will only be know when a request is received and initial searches are made.
