Officers With Penalty Points (407A/23)
Request
Q1: How many officers are authorised to drive a police vehicle?
Q2: How many officers have penalty points on their driving license?
Q3: How many officers have 1-3 penalty points.
Q4: How many officers have 4-6 penalty points.
Q5: How many officers have 7-9 penalty points.
Q6: How many officers have 10 penalty points.
Q7: How many officers have 11 penalty points.
Q8: How many officers have 12 penalty points and still driving?
Q9: How many officers have 13 penalty points or more and still driving?
Q10: How many officers are disqualified from holding or obtaining a driving licence?
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see ‘Reason for Decision’ below).
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). 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
Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
Unfortunately, we do not hold information in relation to questions 2 – 10 in a retrievable format. Officers are required to submit on a change of circumstance form and there is no way of identifying which change of circumstance submissions relate to driving offences and penalty points. To obtain this information it would involve a manual trawl through each individual case. There are in excess of 2000 records, taking approximately 10 minutes per case. This would equate to in excess of 300 hours and would therefore exceed the 18 hour time limit.
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.