Sexual Offences Act (1259A/20)
Request
Please consider this Freedom of Act Request. The relevant dates are July 1st 2019 to June 30th 2020.
Please advise the following,
- Number of persons charged under Section 69 of The Sexual Offences Act 2003 in your Force area. (Intercourse with an animal).
- The number of people referred to your Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements after a conviction under Section 69 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003.
- Number of persons charged under Section 63 of The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 (Possession of extreme pornographic images)
- Number of the charges as above (Section 63) that involved animals.
- The number of people referred to your Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements after a conviction under Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008.
- How many of those referred in Question 5 were convicted under Section 63, sub-section (7)(d) – intercourse or oral sex with an animal.
Response
Please be advised that the information that you have requested is not all available in a readily retrievable format.
In relation questions 5 & 6; we have 222 offenders with a conviction under this section, but not all of them would be subject to MAPPA referrals. In order to ascertain how many there are, we would need to locate these records and manually review each individual case to assess the circumstances of the convictions. Additionally, we would need to cross reference this against multiple systems in order to identify whether they had a requirement/referral to MAPPA. However, it would take approximately 30 minutes to manually review each individual record (222 x 0.5 = 111 Hours).
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 for questions 1 – 4.
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: