E-Scooters (1800A/21)
Request
How many electric / e-scooters have been confiscated in your area between 01 January 2019 and 01 December 2021. Please can you provide the figures on a month-by-month basis for this time period.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
However, although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached file 1800A_21_attachment.pdf). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
REASON FOR DECISION
Although we have been able to provide information in relation to your request for this current year (see ‘response’ above and attached data), prior to 2021 we did not have a category for ‘e-scooters’ on our vehicle recovery system. Therefore, in order to determine the number of e-scooters seized before this time would require a manual trawl of records. Such a search however would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: