Taxi drivers convicted of driving offence (630/20)
Request
How Many Taxi and Private Hire drivers have been convicted for driving offences in the years 2018 and 2019. Broken down into those years.
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 the following information, relative to your request, retrieved before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. 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.
| Number of Taxi drivers charged for Driving Offences | Year | ||
| 2018 | 2019 | Total | |
| Drive motor vehicle when alcohol level above limit. | 7 | 4 | 11 |
| Drive motor vehicle with a proportion of a specified controlled drug above the specified limit. | 1 | 1 | |
| Fail to provide specimen – person in charge of vehicle. | 1 | 1 | |
| Fail to provide specimen for analysis – vehicle driver. | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| In charge of motor vehicle – alcohol level above limit. | 1 | 1 | |
| Total | 10 | 8 | 18 |
Please be advised that occupation is not a mandatory recording field on WMP systems, and the information supplied is only for the records where Taxi or Private Hire driver has been included, therefore all relevant records may not have been captured.
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of incidents/crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of incidents/crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently statistics on incidents/crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future incidents in that area.
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.
As recommended as good practice by the Information Commissioner’s Office a version of this response may be published on the West Midlands Police website.
REASON FOR DECISION
West Midlands Police data is not organised in such a way that allows for the search of “convictions”. In order to retrieve this information each individual case would need to be reviewed, followed by further enquiries with the courts / PNC Bureau. Please note that researching each individual case would exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12). Therefore we have provided you with the number of taxi drivers charged to court. We are unable to comment on what happened to them at court and the resulting conviction / dismissal.
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.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
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