Illegal Scooters (1510A/23)
Request
In the last 12 months:
I would like to know how many a) arrests, b) fines and c) destruction has happened in the West Bromwich area of illegal electric scooters and bicycles? I have seen some being able to reach speeds over 30 mph (overtaking cars).
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. With regard to question a), there are no central recording categories or filters on our arrests database to capture e-scooter arrests. This means that in order to identify relevant information we would need to manually review over 35,000 custody records for driving offences. However, we estimate that to manually check each of these records would take in excess of 500 hours, which would far 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.
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 an answer to questions b) and c) as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please find this information below and note this information has been provided by different departments, hence the discrepancy in the time periods.
b) 0 tickets have been issued for e-scooters between 10/10/2022 and 10/10/2023
c) 7 e-scooters have disposed of between 01/10/2022 and 30/09/2023 in the Sandwell area (we are unable to identify specifically how many of these were within West Bromwich).
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
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