Cannabis Offences (369A/23)
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act, please could you provide the following data relating to the production of cannabis.
1a) The number of recorded offences of production or being concerned in production of a controlled drug – Class B – Cannabis – for each of the following years: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 (partial data)
1b) Please specify the amount/quantity seized for each offence recorded.
2a) Please also detail the number of recorded offences of permitting premises to be used for producing cannabis for each of the following years: 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023 (partial data)
2b) Please specify, for each individual count, the type of properties in which operations were found: ie commercial, residential, warehouse, derelict or other.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. In relation to question 1b), the amount and quantity of cannabis seized is not held in a centrally collated format – there are no recording fields on our crime recording database to easily determine this information. This detail may be recorded within the overall case file, however, to determine this would require manually reading the case files of each individual record. We have identified 6,235 offences concerned in the production of cannabis, and we estimate it would take approximately 5 minutes to review each record. To conduct these manual searches however, would equate to approximately 520 hours of work, far exceeding the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
Therefore, 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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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 find this attached (369A_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.
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.