Birds of Prey (642A/22)
Request
I am writing to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 about the number of reports the police force has received, regarding the number of confirmed dead birds of prey over the past five years.
- Please would you be able to tell me the number of dead birds of prey that have been confirmed by the police for each year?
- Please would you be able to tell me the cause of death confirmed by the police for each dead bird of prey for each year? If the answer is unknown, please state this.
- Finally, for each year, would you be able to tell me how many of these confirmed deaths resulted in some form of police prosecution stating whether or not each prosecution was successful?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit of 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 as follows):
I can confirm that we have had no referrals of this kind through any of our Wildlife Crime Officers*.
*A number of officers in the force are Wildlife Crime Officers (WCO), and deal with this on top of their current roles. This ensures a professional response to Wildlife Crime from WMP, in order to support our communities and partners and deliver a quality response.
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 reports of this nature should be referred to our WCOs, it is always possible that a report(s) were received by our Contact centre that didn’t get referred. However, there is no way to confirm this without undertaking a manual review of incident logs. Such a search though 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 confirming or denying that any information is held would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(2) 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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