Child Protection Referrals (215A/22)
Request
1) How many child protection referrals were made by the force to social services between 1 Jan 2020 and 31 December 2021 broken down by month?
1a) How many child protection referrals were made by the force to social services in the calendar years 2018 and 2019? Please can I have the data broken down by year.
2) How many Civil Court Orders were received by the force between 1 Jan 2020 and 31 December 2021? Please provide an aggregate for each year and a breakdown by month. If possible, please confirm how many of these orders involved children.
2a) How many Civil Court Orders were received by the force in the calendar years 2018 and 2019? Please can I have the data broken down by year. If possible, please confirm how many of these orders involved children.
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 questions 2 and question 2a, this information is not all held in a centrally collated format. Court Orders are dealt with by different departments depending on what they concern and what is being requested. In relation to Court Orders dealt with by our Public Protection Unit, we would have to manually review thousands of records in order to determine the requested information. 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, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request. Therefore, in relation to questions 2 and 2a, I can provide information recorded by our Civil Disclosure Unit who deal with child Court Orders only, as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
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: