Training Officers Spend (1473A/22)
Request
Between the years July 2015 – July 2022, I would like the following information, broken down by year.
- How much per year did your police force spend on training officers
- Of this, how much went into training new recruits
2. How much per year did your force spend on recruitment, and how many new recruits joined your force?
Please do let me know that you have received this request and get in touch should you have any follow-up questions.
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 under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. This is because information prior to 2017 is not recorded/collated in an easily retrievable format. Therefore, to try to determine this information would require a manual review of our systems and files which would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). Additionally, information pertaining to ‘peripheral’ costs of recruitment (such as Vetting, Occupational Health or recruiting manager time/other departmental costs) would not be separately recorded or identifiable because these officers/staff members would be carrying out their normal daily duties.
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, under 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.