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Modern Slavery (1315A/22)

Request

  1. How many allegations of modern slavery have been made to your force since 2014?
  2. How many crime reports with the category of modern slavery have been made since 2014?
  3. How many charges have been brought related to modern slavery since 2014?
  4. How many convictions have been made related to modern slavery since 2014?

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 of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).

However, 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 1315A_22_attachment.pdf and please note that data are only available from September 2015). 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.

REASON FOR DECISION

With regard to question 1 (allegations); there is no way of determining this information without undertaking a manual trawl of incident logs and police officer pocket notebooks. However, this would be a huge undertaking, involving thousands upon thousands of records and such a search would far exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).

Additionally, with regard to question 4; court data are not fed back into our crime recording systems; therefore, we are unable to determine the number of offences that resulted in a conviction, without undertaking a manual review of cases. Such a search however would also 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

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.

Attachments

1315A_22_attachment