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 Since the inception of "Clare's Law," please provide the total number of Disclosure Requests by Calendar Year (up to and including 31st January 2020,) by:
Gender,
Age,
Ethnic Origin.
For your ease of reference, please provide the details for the "Person At Risk" i.e. the person for whom the enquiry has been made by directly and/or on behalf of.
2 Since the inception of "Clare's Law," please provide the gender of the person making the enquiry directly on behalf of the "Person at Risk".
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.
The information requested is not already collated nor is it held in a format that allows its extraction within the permitted 18 hour threshold.
The only method available to us to establish the information you are requesting is by a manual review of records, there is no search facility on recording methods that would allow its electronic retrieval.
Last year alone there were 1500 applications. Each application would require a manual review to establish a response to each part of this request. Even at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information for that time period alone would take over 125 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.
