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:
With regards to Clare's Law - Please provide the total number of Disclosure Requests form the period 1st May 2018 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.
In Response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
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.
To establish a response to your queries outlined would require approximately 2,277 records to be located and manually reviewed, to establish the gender, age and ethnic origin of each individual that has submitted a request under Clare’s Law as this information is not recorded in an electronically/easily searchable format. Even at a conservative estimate of 10 minutes per record, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 379 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.
