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. How many RTAs requests were made by someone other than the victim to your force in the years 2018-20, broken down by year (this could include friends, family members or professionals).
2. How many of these RTAs resulted in disclosure broken down by year.
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Safeguarding 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.
(You should note that if the application was submitted by a professional e.g. police officer/police staff then this would be recorded as a ‘Right to Know’ not Right to Ask.)
The information requested is not already held statistically nor is it held in a format that allows its extraction from systems within the permitted 18 hour threshold.
For 2020 alone approximately 1500 records would require a manual review to establish if the request had been made by someone other than the victim. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as a reasonable minimum, we have estimated that to locate, extract and compile this information would take over 125 hours for that year alone. Further time would then be required to establish a response at point 2. As this request would far exceed the permitted 18 hours , 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.
