Controlling or Coercive Behaviour (1976/20)
Request
1) Please can you tell me how many reports of controlling or coercive behaviour were made under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 to officers for the calendar years:
a. 2016
b. 2017
c. 2018
d. 2019
e. 2020 to date.
2.) Please can you tell me how many arrests under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 (controlling or coercive behaviour) were made by your officers for the calendar years:
a. 2016
b. 2017
c. 2018
d. 2019
e. 2020 to date.
3) Please can you give me the outcomes (charged, not in public interest etc) of the arrests / offences committed identified in the answers to Q1a-c
a. 2016
b. 2017
c. 2018
d. 2019
e. 2020 to date.
4) Can you tell me the number of referrals to the CPS by your force for a prosecution under section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015 were rejected/not taken forward by the CPS for the calendar years (by this I mean cases brought to the CPS by your police force that is not taken to prosecution for whatever reason eg lack of evidence etc):
a. 2016
b. 2017
c. 2018
d. 2019
e. 2020 to date.
5) Can you please provide all of this data in either an .xls/.xlsx/.csv file format?
Response
Please be advised that the information you have requested is not all held in a readily retrievable format. The force is unable to provide prosecution data for question 4 as this information is not routinely fed back into our systems, and we do not have access to magistrates’ court data.
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 order to assist, I can advise that we are able to provide information for the remainder of your request. Please see attached (1976_Attachment).
These data should be interpreted with caution; the figures provided 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.
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: