Careless Driving (1473A/23)
Request
- How many drivers have been pulled over for ‘middle lane hogging’ in your force area, broken down by year for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date?
- How many drivers have been penalised (e.g. issued a fine and/or points) for ‘middle lane hogging’ in your force area, broken down by year for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date?
- The total number of drivers caught/penalised for careless driving in your force area broken down by year for 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date
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 1, this information is not routinely recorded and is not held in a centrally collated format; this would likely be contained within individual pocket notebooks or on police logs. These would have to be searched for manually, however, there would be a huge number of pocket notebooks and hundreds of thousands of police logs (approximately 3000-4000 per day). In relation to question 2, ‘middle lane hogging’ is not a standalone offence that we can search for – lane hogging forms part of the due care offence, therefore, to identify this information we would have to manually review each ticket that was issued for careless driving. We have identified 5,911 tickets that would need reviewing which we estimate would equate to over 985 hours of work. To conduct both of these manual searches therefore would far 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.
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 the information for question 3 as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this information below.
| OFFENCE DESCRIPTION | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 |
| Drive a mechanically propelled vehicle on a road / in a public place without due care and attention | 1,215 | 1,201 | 1,361 | 882 |
| Drive a mechanically propelled vehicle on a road / in a public place without reasonable consideration to other users | 322 | 432 | 123 | 375 |
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
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.
Attachments
No attachments