FAQ Details
Demonstrations - 241/12
Dated: 07 Jun 2011
Date of request: 01/03/2012
Date of response: 27/03/2012
Provision of information held by Northumbria Police made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the 'Act')(FOIA)
Thank you for your email dated 1 March 2012 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:
I request to know how many officers were deployed to deal with the tuc march from Gateshead to Newcastle by the tuc on the 30 of November 2011
I request to know who was the most senior officer present
I request to know was there a operation name given to this event and if so what it was called
I request to know how much did it cost to police the demonstration
I request to know were there any arrests carried out during the protests
In response:
We have now had the opportunity to fully consider your request and I provide a response for your attention.
As advised in your acknowledgment on 1 March 2012, this request has been aggregated with your similar request, FOI 240/12 refers, due to cost and time considerations under the Acts legislation.
A subsequent request was received on 12 March 2012, again on the same subject matter and this has also been taken into consideration due to time and cost implications.
The Fees Regulations state that two or more requests to one public authority can be aggregated for the purposes of calculating costs if they are:
by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority
to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;
for the same or similar information; and
the subsequent request is received by the public authority within 60 working days of the previous request.
The intention of this provision is to prevent individuals or organisations evading the appropriate limit by dividing a request into smaller parts.
Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Operations Department of Northumbria Police. I can confirm that the information you have requested is held by Northumbria Police, however when aggregated with your previous requests, FOI 240/12 and FOI 273/12 refers, we have estimated that to extract this information would take over the prescribed 18 hours, therefore Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act applies. 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 your requests.
Although excess cost removes Northumbria Police's obligations under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information below, relative to this request, retrieved or available 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 your request/s.
A total of 615 officers.
ACC Ashman.
Serenitas.
No information held. Officers and staff involved did so within the normal working day. Any associated costs are not identified or collated/attributed to this operation.
Nil.
You may be interested to know that Northumbria Police routinely publish information that has been disclosed by Northumbria Police in response to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 via the Disclosure Log. The aim of the Disclosure Log is to promote openness and transparency by voluntarily placing information into the public arena.
Whilst it is not possible to publish all responses we will endeavour to publish those where we feel that the information disclosed is in the public interest. The Disclosure Log will be updated once responses have been sent to the requester. I have provided the relevant link below:-
http://www.northumbria.police.uk/foi/disclosurelog/index.asp
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.