Disclosure Types (1511A/21)
Request
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information relating to information disclosures.
Please share with me the total number of unique correspondence cases logged between 1st April 2020 and 31st March 2021 and the percentage of these which were answered on time (only where there is a mandated response time and so this stat will already be tracked and available) for the following areas:
- Data protection requests (including subject access requests and other data subject requests made possible under GDPR)
- Freedom of Information and Environmental Information Regulations
- Complaints
- Ministerial Correspondence (questions from MPs made on behalf of their constituents)
- Parliamentary Questions (questions raised in parliament requiring information from you)
- Any other official correspondence type, such as enquiries, feedback or compliments which are logged and tracked.
For clarity, I’m just seeking the total number of unique cases and not specifics such as the number of individual emails that have been sent or received whilst working on each case.
Finally, please confirm which software application is being used to track these requests i.e. Excel, Sharepoint, Access or a specific case management tool – in which case, please state which one.
Response
With regard to question f), 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 other types of correspondence may be logged and tracked by various departments and teams across the force and in order to identify these processes we would have to separately approach each individual department.
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, in accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide an answer for the remainder of your request as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see attached document.
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here: