Sex Offenders (1164A/22)
Request
Would you be able to answer the following as a refined request for disclosure of the following information, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“FoI”) instead please? If you cannot provide these data for three financial years, could you do so for one financial year within cost limits?
Description of information sought:
1) How many sex offenders did your force have registered living in the force area in each of the past three financial years?
2) How many sex offenders have made a notification to your force that they have changed their identity through name change in each of the past three financial years and how many did the force discover retrospectively had changed their identity through name change without first informing the force in each of the past three financial years?
3) How many offences have been committed by sex offenders within your police force area of failure to comply with the notification requirement in each of the past three financial years?
4) How long does it take for a registered sex offender to be classed as “missing” from your police force area?
5) How many registered sex offenders went missing from your police force area in each of the past three financial years?
– Please provide these data in an .xlsx/.xls/.csv file format so I am capable to re-use them as per Section 11 of FoI.
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not all available in a readily retrievable format. With regard to the second part of question 2, we are unable to separate out those convicted of ‘failing to comply’ in relation to a name change; to determine this would require manually reviewing each fail to notify offence individually. Due to the number of fail to notify offences recorded over the requested time period, to manually review these 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 information for the remainder of your request as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
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.