Covid Breaches (1112A/21)
Request
Under the FOI Act I request the following information:
Number of COVID-19 breach reports to WMP.
Number of Police responses to the above reports.
Statistics of outcomes to the above responses.
If this could be broken down to local/ responding police station, that would be fantastic.
Clarification received 30/07/2021:
Is it possible to get the data from the introduction of the rules?
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. This is because the information requested for questions 2 and 3 is not centrally recorded which means in order to determine this we would need to manually review 36,107 logs individually. To conduct this manual 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 and can provide relevant information for question 1 as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this below.
Number of incidents recorded between 1st April 2020 and 31st July 2021 with an initial classification of ‘COVID Breach’ broken down by Neighbourhood Policing Unit:
| Neighbourhood Policing Unit | Total |
| Birmingham East | 6,571 |
| Birmingham West | 8,526 |
| Coventry | 4,800 |
| Dudley | 3,304 |
| Solihull | 2,108 |
| Sandwell | 4,007 |
| Walsall | 3,525 |
| Wolverhampton | 3,266 |
| Total | 36,107 |
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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