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:
I want to submit a request for some information from the organisation, in relation to their contract’s register. The contract register should display all the organisations existing/live contracts I would like the register to display the following columns/headings:
1. Contract Reference
2. Contract Title
3. Procurement Category
4. Supplier Name
5. Spend (Total or Annual)
6. Contract Duration
7. Contract Extensions
8. Contract Starting Date
9. Expiration Date
10. Contract Description [Please provide me with as much detail as possible.]
11. Contact Owner (Full contact details if possible.)
12. CPV codes/ProClass
IMPORTANT
1. For those organisation planning to make an exemption around spend, the spend information I have requested is an overall figure and I am not requesting a complete breakdown of services relating to the spend.
2. If the organisation has a CRM system or a similar system there should be a facility to download and extract contract data.
3. You may forward me a Weblink to a portal to download the contract register, please make sure all of the organisation’s contracts are provided as doing prior research I have found that most organisations have only uploaded a small portion of all of their contracts.
Please do not think that this is the only information I require if you could provide me with more information that would be great.
Contract Data/API Contact Details
13. Can you also provide me with contact details of the person responsible for the actual contract’s register or someone responsible for API? [Name, Job Title, Telephone, Email Address] At the very least provide me with their actual job title.
(Meaning of API "a set of functions and procedures that allow the creation of applications which access the features or data of an operating system, application, or other service.")
In Response:
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Procurement Department of Northumbria Police. We can confirm that the information you have requested is held, in part, by Northumbria Police however some of this data cannot be disclosed for the following reasons.
As some of the information you have requested above is accessible by other means and as such we 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 your request.
We 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.
Some of this information is freely available via a search of the Bluelight Procurement Database (BLPD) and in order to aid and assist your further we have provided a link below to the website:
From the database you will be able to extract some of the information which you seek.
To provide a response to the parts of your request not covered by Section 21 above, would entail the manual retrieval, review and compilation of a significant amount of information. We have assessed that this exercise would far exceed the permitted 18 hour threshold and 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.
It should also be noted that to extract this information would also require the creation of reports to run from different databases and sources, to extract the information, manipulation of the reports, sorting, querying and collation the data etc. Therefore, we hold no information as "Manipulation of the raw data to produce the requested information would require levels of skill and judgement" - Johnson v ICO July 2007.
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 we see no reasonable way in which we can do so.
Please note that the requested information regarding who manages our contracts can be located via our website, in order to aid and assist you I have provided a link to the relevant page below:
https://beta.northumbria.police.uk/about-us/publications-and-documents/finance/procurement/
