Children Remanded (1312A/23)
Request
For the year ending December 2022:
a) How many children (10-17 year olds) were remanded by your police force (i.e. refused post-charge bail and detained in police custody or a PACE bed until their court hearing).
b) What proportion of those children remanded by your police force went on to be remanded by the court?
c) What was the breakdown of court outcomes received by children who were originally remanded by the police
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all this information within the appropriate (cost) limit of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, for part a) of your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see as follows). 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:
For the year ending December 2022:
a) How many children (10-17 year olds) were remanded by your police force (i.e. refused post-charge bail and detained in police custody or a PACE bed until their court hearing).
= 478
REASON FOR DECISION
b) & c) – Court data are not fed back into our custody system. Therefore, in order to determine the requested information for parts b) and c) we would need to separately go into the custody records of the 478 individuals identified in part a) and cross reference each of these with information held on PNC. Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). You might instead however, wish to approach HM Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) for this information.
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:
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