Response Times (135A/23)
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please can you provide me with responses to the following regarding police attendance response times for 999 calls.
If you do not use the grades 1-3 grading system, please could you provide the equivalent figures for the system you use for prioritising calls.
1) Please could you provide the average police response time to attend 999 calls categorised as (i) grade 1 emergency, (ii) grade 2, (iii) grade 3, for each of the five calendar years from 2018 to 2022.
2) Please could you provide the number and proportion of emergency calls that were not responded to within the target time for (i) grade 1 emergency, (ii) grade 2, (iii) grade 3, for each of the five calendar years from 2018 to 2022.
3) Please could you provide the individual longest police response time to attend a 999 call for (i) a grade 1 emergency, (ii) grade 2, (iii) grade 3, for each of the five calendar years from 2018 to 2022.
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.
We’re working to develop a new local policing model which will put more resources back into our local policing teams to help increase police visibility, prevent and tackle crime and respond more effectively when the public need us.
REASON FOR DECISION
Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). Unfortunately, the system that we currently use to source the data only goes back to March 2020, everything prior to this doesn’t show any data at all, therefore a manual search would be required to locate and retrieve this information, this search would exceed the FOI 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.
Attachments
135A_ATTACHMENT_03 135A_ATTACHMENT_02 135A_ATTACHMENT_01 135A_ATTACHMENT_04