Number Plate Offences (320A/20)
Request
- How many times from 2015 to 2020 (to date) has your force informed the DVLA it has issued a penalty notice for a number plate that does not comply with the requirements of the Road Vehicles (Display of Registration Marks) Regulations 2001? Please break this information down by calendar year.
- How many times from 2015 to 2020 (to date) has your force issued two penalty notices relating to the same registration number and vehicle keeper for failing to comply with the requirements of the Road Vehicles (Display of Registration Marks) Regulations 2001? Please break this information down by calendar year.
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 (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 320A_20_attachment.pdf). 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
There is no central record of the number of times the DVLA were informed in relation to penalty notices issued for VRM Not Conforming/Missing. Therefore in order to determine this information, we would need to conduct a manual review of every single case. Please note that researching each individual case would 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 confirming or denying that the information is held would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12(2) 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: