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September 30, 2022 | Investigations and Operations

Reference: F-2022-01396

Request

We would like to request 999 and 101 call handling in Northern Ireland in 2016. Additionally, for each call we would like information on the response, specifically the C&C incident type.

We would like to use this data in a spatial and temporal analysis, and therefore which to have information on the address from which the call was made (or the address provided by the caller) and the date of the call. If gaining this information at the address-level is challenging for privacy reasons, then having it at the postcode level, Small Area, or Small Output Area would suffice.

Depending on the format in which the data are stored, we imagine a data sheet with the following four columns: date, location, call type (999 or 101), C&C incident type (emergency, priority, scheduled, or early resolution). This data sheet would consist of 715,830 rows.

We understand that this is still a large request. If it still exceeds appropriate costs, then it would suffice to restrict our request to 999 calls (173,690). However, our preference is for both 999 and 101 call data.

Funding options for initial request:
We understand that the initial request was flawed because the 101-call number was only introduced in 2014. However, we are still interested in the call data for the 1998-2021 period (999 calls for the entire period and 101-calls for 2014-2021).

Therefore, we would like to know what options exist for us to fund the location, retrieval, and extraction of this data. The Information Commissioner’s Office website states that authorities can charge for a request, although these ‘disbursements’ appear to be limited in nature. We potentially have sufficient research budgets for this type of activity if it were an option.

Again, thank you for an incredibly helpful and insightful response to our initial request. We are hopeful that our refined request will be possible and hope to find out more about potentially funding our initial request.

F-2022-01396