Drivers Without Insurance (1313A/23)
Request
- The total number of motorists caught driving without insurance in your force area, broken down by year for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date.
- The total number of motorists caught driving without insurance in your force area, broken down by age for 2021, 2022 and 2023 combined.
- The total number of cars seized for not being insured in your force area, broken down by year for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date.
- The amount paid by drivers to release seized cars (for not having the correct insurance) in your force area, broken down by year for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date.
- The number of cars destroyed after being seized for not having the correct insurance, broken down by year for the years 2021, 2022, and 2023 to date.
- (a)The number of cars sold / auctioned after being seized for not having the correct insurance, and (b) the total amount of money made through sales, broken down by year for the years 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date.
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. In relation to question 2, the only way to identify the age of the driver is to go into each individual record and check this manually. We estimate it would take approximately 10 minutes to review the details of each record, and due to the volume of records (3,557), these searches would take in excess of 500 hours to complete. Such a search, however, 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 this request as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this information attached (1313A_Attachment).
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:
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. 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.