Response Times (151A/22)
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:
1/ Please provide the average annual police response time to attend 999 calls categorised as (i) grade 1 emergency, (ii) grade 2, (iii) grade 3, and (iv) all grades, for each year from 2011 up until and including 2021. Please also provide both the total annual number of calls and time taken to attend for each part of the question.
Grades 1 to 3 typically refer to an emergency response, a prompt response and a routine response. Please provide a description of the different grades (including expected response times to attend) used by the force if these differ. An example for GMP is included here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-47582743
2/ Please provide the total number of occasions that police did not attend i) grade 1, ii) grade 2 or iii) grade 3 emergencies last year (2021).
3/ Please provide the longest individual time taken to attend a grade 1 emergency call in 2021.
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. In relation to calls received for the time period requested, due to system changes and the way we have recorded data over the period of time requested. To locate and retrieve the amount of data would exceed the cost threshold under FOI.
Therefore, 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
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 information we have previously released and some additional information to assist. Please see 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
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
In addition ,Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution.
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.