Covid fines and breaches (969A/20)
Request
Q1: To date how many fines have been issued for breaching Covid regulations? Please breakdown into types of breaches?
Q2: How many £1000 and £10k fines have been issued and for what?
Q3: How many parties or large party gathering have the police broken up?
Q4: How many protests have the police been notified of or attended, please provide details?
Q5: How many funerals have the police been notified of or attended?
Q6: How many reports have the police received via their online form complaining of breaches of the regulations? Please break down into each month.
On 2/11/2020 we sent a not valid response as no name on the request as per the regulations.
On 3/11/2020 you responded with your full name.
On 3/11/2020 we clarified your request in relation to the dates that you required the search for.
On 4/11/2020 you responded:
“The start date should be the date the Covid regulations came into force in March. The end date should be the date your information goes up to on the date you process the request.”
Therefore the new request should read:
Dates to search from 1st March 2020 to 31st October 2020
Q1: To date how many fines have been issued for breaching Covid regulations? Please breakdown into types of breaches?
Q2: How many £1000 and £10k fines have been issued and for what?
Q3: How many parties or large party gathering have the police broken up?
Q4: How many protests have the police been notified of or attended, please provide details?
Q5: How many funerals have the police been notified of or attended?
Q6: How many reports have the police received via their online form complaining of breaches of the regulations? Please break down into each month.
Response
We can confirm that some relevant information is held by West Midlands Police. However, we are withholding that information since it is exempt by virtue of the following exemptions
Section 31 (1) (a) (b) (c) (Law enforcement)
Section 40 (2) Personal information
In line with the above, I am required to complete a Prejudice Test/Public Interest Test (PIT) on disclosure. Please find this PIT attached. (969A_20 PIT)
Section 40 (2) allows for personal data to be withheld where release would breach the third party’s data protection rights. It would be unfair to release this information where any person could be identified from the data and in this case the right to privacy outweighs any public interest in release.
Also:
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).
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 attachment : 969A_20 attachment). 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.
Please note that West Midlands Police do not “issue” fines, we record them and ACRO actually issue the fines. Here is a link for you to retrieve the information from ACRO.
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.