Corrosive Substances (476A/24)
Request
Under the FOI Act 2000, please provide me with the number of reports for each of these offences broken down by year (calendar) each of 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019.
1) Section 6 – Possession of a corrosive substance in public place
2) Section 18 – Wounding or causing GBH with intent with the use of a corrosive substance
3) Section 20 – Unlawful wounding or inflicting grievous bodily harm with the use of a corrosive substance
4) Section 29 – Sending, throwing or using explosive or corrosive substance or noxious thing with intent to do grievous bodily harm (when it is corrosive substance)
If within the time allowed, under each type of offence in each year, please provide breakdown of the corrosive substance where mentioned.
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below). In relation to the types of substance used, we do not record this in a separate field. In order to locate and retrieve this information we would need to manually review each of the records, which at 5 minutes per record would equate to over 31 hours and would exceed the FOI time limit.
Although excess cost removes the force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see attached, please note we have searched for the data using weapons list within our recording systems). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request.
REASON FOR DECISION
Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
The cost of compliance with the whole of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(1) of the FOI Act 2000. For West Midlands Police, the appropriate limit is set at £450, as prescribed by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004, S.I. 3244.