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:
- The number of National Speed Awareness Course's taken by UK drivers in the past five complete calendar years, broken down by month.
- Please can you also send the total revenue received or fines issued from NSACs in each year for the past five complete calendar years, broken down by month.
- Please can you provide a breakdown for each offence on the speed recorded compared to the mph limit for where the offence was committed.
- How many of the people that were offered to take the National Speed Awareness Course had previously taken the course.
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Fixed Penalty Unit of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held, in part, by Northumbria Police, however cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
To establish a response at points 3 and 4 for last year alone would require approximately 65,000 speeding offences to be located and manually reviewed to establish which offence each offence related to, the speed recorded and the numbers previously offered a National Speed Awareness. 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 10,833 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.
It should also be noted that had Section 12 not been fully applicable other exemptions would have been considered and applied where relevant.
