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Dangerous Parking (612A/21)

Request

Please could I have the numbers for people fined for the offence of dangerous parking in the past 6 years in the wards of Kings Norton, Northfield and Longbridge.

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).

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 file 612A_21_attachment.pdf and please note data are only available from 2016). 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.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.

The figures provided therefore 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.

As recommended as good practice by the Information Commissioner’s Office a version of this response may be published on the West Midlands Police website.

REASON FOR DECISION

Location is not recorded in a consistent format on our penalty notice system and as a result, will not always include the name of the area. Therefore in order to accurately determine the total number of tickets issued for the offence of ‘dangerous parking’ in the past 6 years in the wards of Kings Norton, Northfield and Longbridge, we would need to manually review every FPN issued during this time for the offences of ‘Cause unnecessary obstruction by motor vehicle / trailer outside of the Greater London area’ or ‘Cause vehicle to be left in a dangerous position’. Between 2016 and 2020 however, there were around 11,000 of these notices issued and to manually review each one would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).

This means that 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.

Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:

https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-content/information-management/freedom-of-information/#fees-and-charges

Attachments

612A_21_attachment