Incidents Involving Mental Health (454A/20)
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I would like to request the following data by quarter for the period of the financial year 2019/20 (April 2019 – March 2020):
1. Police incidents involving mental health
2. Number of mental-health related incidents that were directed to A&E
3. Details of quantity, length and type of training provided to police officers regarding mental health related incidents
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
This is because we do not have a category or marker on our incident recording database that can identify whether an incident was subsequently directed to A&E. Therefore, in order to ascertain this information we would have to manually review every mental health related incident log for the requested time period, which would involve 17,135 records.
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 relevant information for questions 1 and 3. Please find this attached.
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.