Drink/Drug Driving (4651/20)
Request
For ongoing road safety research, could you please provide a monthly breakdown from January 2017 to December 2019 on those arrested and subsequently charged (and ideally conviction rates also) with:
1) Excess alcohol – Contrary to section 5 RTA 1988
2) Drug driving – Contrary to section 5A RTA 1988
eg
January 2017
excess alcohol
arrested – 100
charged – 90
convicted – 80
Drug driving
Arrested – 20
Charged – 18
convicted -16
and so on each month to December 2019.
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not all available in a readily retrievable format. The force is unable to provide prosecution data as this information is not routinely fed back into our systems and we do not have access to magistrate’s court data.
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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 information for the remainder of your request. Please see attached document (4651_Attachment).
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.