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Coronavirus Fines - 1200/20

Date Responded 06 August 2020

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 fines were issued to people breaking the rules imposed due to the coronavirus pandemic?
  2. In relation to this, how many fines were paid and how many were taken to court.

In Response:

We can confirm that the information you have requested is held, in part, by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.

  1. As the information you have requested at this point is accessible by other means I have not provided you with a copy of the information and will rely on Section 21 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. You should therefore consider this a refusal for this part of your request.

I have provided an explanation to this exemption below.

Section 21 (1) - Information accessible by other means

Information which is reasonably accessible to the applicant is exempt information.

The numbers of fines issued are published as a matter of course by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). In order to assist I have provided the relevant link below:

https://news.npcc.police.uk/

2.No information held with regards to how many of the above mentioned fines were paid or how many were taken to court. This information may be available via the Local Authorities. We would suggest that you direct this part of your query to them.

You may be aware that a publication strategy is in place with regards to requests received by Northumbria Police where the information required in the requests relates to Corona - Coronavirus - Covid 19 and Virus.  To aid and assist you, I have copied the link to the strategy below:

https://beta.northumbria.police.uk/advice-and-info/how-we-operate/freedom-of-information-request/

 

Disclaimer

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police. Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation. In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.

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