MARAC Referrals (411A/21)
Request
Could you please let me know the amount of MARAC referrals have been made in the Force area in the last five years?
Could you please also tell me how many of the victims per year were male and from heterosexual relationships.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because the Regional MARAC team only came into existence in April 2019, therefore we are unable to provide data prior to this. In addition, the relationship between the victim and offender is not centrally collated on our systems, which means we would need to manually enter each record to identify this information. Such a search, however, would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide the number of MARAC referrals for the period April 2019 – March 2020 and April 2020 – March 2021, and how many victims were male. Please find this information below.
April 2019 – March 2020
Total referrals = 3679
Where the victim is male = 195
April 2020 – March 2021
Total referrals = 4707
Where the victim is male = 215
NB It is possible for cases to be referred to MARAC more than once, therefore, the requested data will not necessarily correlate with the number of victims, as one victim could be referred more than once in a 12 month period.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.
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