E-Scooters (805A/21)
Request
I am seeking information on e-scooter use in the jurisdiction of West Midlands Police, for the latest available date and preferably broken down by whether the vehicles are part of the sanctioned schemes or privately owned.
1) How many incident reports have there been regarding e-scooters that do not belong to authorized schemes in the past four years?
Please can this data be broken down into incident type and if possible by year, for example, unauthorized use of a vehicle, drunk driving, collision, inappropriate use of the vehicle e.g. pavement riders or tandem riding, riding with no license.
2) How many incident reports have there been regarding use of e-scooters that are under authorized schemes since their inception?
Please can this data be broken down into incident type and if possible by year, for example, unauthorized use of a vehicle, drunk driving, collision, inappropriate use of the vehicle e.g. pavement riders or tandem riding, riding with no license.
3) Overall, over the past four years, how many arrests have been made of e-scooter users? If possible can this be broken down by year.
4) Overall, over the past four years, how many fines have been levied on e-scooter users and what is the value of these? If possible can this be broken down by year.
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.
In relation to questions 1-3, this information is not centrally held in a retrievable format with regard to incidents/arrests that have involved e-scooters. This is because our incident/arrest logs do not have a central recording category or marker that identifies e-scooters. Therefore, to perform a search for this term would return every incident containing the word “scooter” and then every individual log would need to be read to see if it falls within the scope of your request. Additionally, a keyword search for “e-scooter” may not return all incidents/arrests that relate to e-scooters because the summary field may contain alternative spellings/terminology, or it may not be referenced within the summary field at all (and instead mentioned somewhere within the actual case file).
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 requested information for question 4 as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this below.
4) Overall, over the past four years, how many fines have been levied on e-scooter users and what is the value of these? If possible can this be broken down by year.
2017 = 0
2018 = 0
2019 = 0
2020 = 4 issued (£100, £300, £300, £50)
2021 = 1 issued (£300)
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:
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