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:
How many vehicles do you currently own or lease broken down by:
- Fuel type
- European Emissions Standard E.g. Euro 6 diesel?
In Response:
Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidelines state that:
A public authority must confirm or deny whether it holds the information requested unless the cost of this alone would exceed the appropriate limit.
I can neither confirm nor deny that the information you require at point 2 of your request is held by Northumbria Police as to actually determine if it is held would exceed the permitted 18 hours therefore Section 12(2) 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.
I have set out the reasons for this below.
To establish a response at point 2 of your request alone would require approximately 750 documents to be located and manually reviewed to establish what, if any, information specific to this part of your request was recorded. Even at a conservative estimate of 3 minutes per document, which we have considered as reasonable, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over 37 hours, therefore Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act is applicable.
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 for question 1.
If this would be useful, you may wish to refine and resubmit your request accordingly
