Northumbria Police

FAQ Details

Fuel & Metal Thefts - 16/10

Dated: 07 Jun 2011

Date of request: 11/01/2010

Date of response: 20/01/2010

Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')(FOIA)

Thank you for your email dated 11 January 2010 in which you made a request for access to certain information which may be held by Northumbria Police.

As you may be aware the purpose of the Act is to allow a general right of access to information held by a Public Authority (including the Police), subject to certain limitations and exemptions.

You asked: 

The number of thefts of a) fuel and b) metal in your force area for each of the last five years (2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009).

Please provide the total value of a)fuel and b)metal stolen in the force area for each of those years.

In response:

We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention. 

As there is no specific crime relating to 'theft of metal' or 'theft of fuel' there is no facility that allows us to retrieve the information requested.

These results therefore have been obtained by conducting searches using the Home Office code for 'Other Theft' and the key words 'fuel' and 'metal', and the Home Office code for 'making off without payment', using the word fuel.

I have not provided a total value for theft of fuel or theft of metal as to obtain this figure would require each crime to be viewed to retrieve that value. 

As there are some 5764 crimes, even at a conservative estimate of approximately 2 minutes per record, we have estimated that to extract this information would take almost 200 hours to retrieve, therefore Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act would apply.  This section does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimated that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours, equating to £450.00

You should consider this to be a refusal notice under section 17 of the Act for that part of your request.

For the information we can provide please see the below document.

Three tables have been provided:-

Table A relates to the offence of "Theft other" where any type of fuel was stolen.
 
Table B relates to the offence of "Bilking" (theft of Petrol / Diesel) from petrol stations / garages etc

Table C is the total for both fuel theft types.

Due to the different methods of recording this information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another using different data systems.  For this reason responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.

The information we have supplied to you is likely to contain intellectual property rights of Northumbria Police.  Your use of the information must be strictly in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) or such other applicable legislation.  In particular, you must not re-use this information for any commercial purpose.

How to complain

If you are unhappy with our decision or do not consider that we have handled your request properly and we are unable to resolve this issue informally, you are entitled to make a formal complaint to us under our complaints procedure which can be found at: http://www.northumbria.police.uk/foi/disclosurelog/foicomprights.asp

If you are still unhappy after we have investigated your complaint and reported to you the outcome, you may complain directly to the Information Commissioner’s Office and request that they investigate to ascertain whether we have dealt with your request in accordance with the Act.

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