FOI T207/24 - Drug Packages

You asked:

For the years 2023,2022,2021,2020 and 2019 I would like to know how many packages posted by Royal Mail have the police seized for containing illegal drugs. If applicable please note which drugs were seized.

Following receipt of your request, searches were conducted with the Corporate Development Department of Northumbria Police.

Information Commissioners Office (ICO) guidelines state that:

A public authority must confirm or deny whether it holds the information requested unless the cost of this alone would exceed the appropriate limit.

We can neither confirm nor deny that the information you require is held by Northumbria Police as to actually determine if it is held would exceed the permitted 18 hours therefore Section 12(2) 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 your request.

We have set out the reasons for this below.

We can confirm that the information requested is not held statistically and it is not held in a format that would allow its extraction from systems within the permitted 18 hour threshold.

The information you have requested refers to the number of packages seized which contain illegal drugs. After assessing your request, we can confirm that the data collection regime applied for this reporting mechanism does not mandate that such these are recorded as per your request.  If we were to provide you with specific numbers of such packages, we would be required to extract the relevant property type data from locally held systems and each record containing the word “drugs” would require manual interrogation to determine whether it was recorded that these were found in a package that was posted by Royal Mail.

In considering this, we have conservatively estimated that to undertake the tasks associated with providing you with an accurate and relevant response would equate to approximately 5 minutes per record, As per the data, there were 400 property records containing the word “drugs” for 2015 alone.  Taking this as an average we estimate that there would be 2,000 property records containing the word “drugs” and each of those would require manual interrogation in order to provide a response to you.

We have calculated, based on the interrogation assessment of 5 minutes per record, that it would take in excess of 166 hours to prepare and provide a response to you that satisfied your request. Accordingly, we can confirm that in this case, this exceeds the cost threshold of 18 hours and we are unable to provide you with the data you require.

We have considered your request and whether there is a realistic possibility of assisting you by refining the remit of your request. Unfortunately, given that the parameters are already clearly defined, it has not been possible on this occasion for us to assist you further and unfortunately we are unable to provide you with any of the information you have requested.