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. The number of people on pre-charge bail for offences flagged as domestic abuse related crime between 01 April 2016- 31 March 2020
2. The number of people on pre-charge bail for sexual offences between 01 April 2016- 31 March 2020.
3. The number of arrests for offences flagged as domestic abuse related crime between 01 April 2016- 31 March 2020.
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted within 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 its extraction within the permitted 18 hours. It is not possible to check bail history within the time limit allowed under the act. Bail information is essentially overwritten by new disposal types, and checking any kind of bail history would require a manual check through each individual crime record. Currently this would require the compilation of a spreadsheet from 1,461 spreadsheets, to provide the number of persons who had been on pre-charge bail over the time period requested, and to ascertain the offence the offender had been bailed for would entail further complex searches. We have estimated that to extract this information would take over well over 18 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.
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 the number of persons currently subject to bail, and not those who have been on bail historically.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly.
