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 most recent year for which you have the data, please can you provide the following information:
1. How many Community Protection Notices (CPNs) have been issued by your police force? Please break this data down into each activity for which the CPN was issued.
2. How many CPNs were subsequently violated, broken down by activity as above.
3. What action was taken as a result of this violation, broken down by activity. If fines were issued, please provide the total value of fines issued.
You then clarified the time period as 2021/22
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held in part by Northumbria Police however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
The information requested is not held centrally, nor it is held in a format that would allow its extraction from systems within the permitted 18 hour threshold. Each Neighbourhood Policing Team keep their own paper based records of such instances. These would all need to be located to establish a response at point 1 alone and this exercise has been estimated as exceeding the permitted 18 hours. Further time would then be required to review those records to provide a response to points 2 and 3, which would add considerably more time to this estimate and 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.
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 give a meaningful response within the prescribed time limit.
