Coronavirus Fines and Arrests ( Coventry ) (119A/20)
Request
1. Please could you provide details of coronavirus penalty notices and arrests in Coventry for the months of March & April 2020 to date?
2. I require the number of individuals who were fined/arrested and what the offences were, grouped by category if necessary.
I appreciate the information may not be available in a readily retrievable format, so I make this for the Coventry area only on the specified dates.
Response
In relation to Question 1 – Our data are not organised in centrally retrievable format to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act Information in relation to FPNs is not held in an electronically retrievable format so each officer would need to be contacted to see whether they had issued an individual with a notice for a fixed penalty.
In relation to question 2 – Individuals would be arrested for the substantive offence rather than failing to comply with the requirements imposed under the coronavirus act. For example Breach of the peace. Therefore each arrested record would need to located and retrieved for this time period and the summary read to see if this contains a mention of the Coronavirus Act.
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
However, In accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice I can advise that FPN data will be published in future by NPCC who are responsible for collating and issuing fines to individuals.
Please see the link below.
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:
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