Custody Officers and Units

Request: FOI/00013553

Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Custody

Subject: Custody Officers and Units

Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Request Details
Please can you provide the following information relating to your detention and custody units. 


Request 1
Relating to the size of your detention and custody units.   
a. number custody units in your force
b. total number of cells within all custody units
c. number of cells within your largest custody unit
d. number of detention officers

Request 2
The annual volume of custody related complaints in the last 12 months (or recent 12 month period) that required an investigation. If possible, split by the following:
a. Property related
b. Defence related (i.e. lack of access to a solicitor, lack of provision of medication, etc.)
c. Health & wellbeing related
d. Other

If you do not have the above split and have an existing report on the volume of custody complaints, please provide that. 

Request 3
How much has been paid out in compensation in the last 12 months for the investigations listed in Question 2, split by the following types:
a. Lost property
b. Defence
c. Health & wellbeing
d. Other

Answer
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.

It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:

(i) determining whether the information is held;
(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;
(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and
(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.

Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at £25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).

When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be:

• made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign;
• made for the same or similar information; and
• received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.

Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

Whilst the information you seek is held electronically by the PSNI, it is not held in a format that would allow its retrieval without manual intervention. PSNI is not saying it does not hold the data that you request, however to extract the data you have sought in your request would require a manual trawl of PSNI’s records – hence putting the request grossly over the 18 hour cost limit set out under the FOIA.
For Request 2, in 2024 a total of 2595 complaints have been submitted to the Police Ombudsman in relation to the PSNI. The way the data is held by PSNI does not allow for the complaints to be broken down into complaints which are custody related. It would therefore be necessary to check each individual complaint, to obtain the requested data. At a conservative estimate of 1 minute to review each complaint, this would require 43 hours work.

As the response for Request 2 attracts an over cost exemption, it follows on that Request 3 is also over cost as we require the data from Request 2 to establish which incidents required an investigation, if claims where submitted for these and thus calculate the amount of compensation paid out within the last 12 months.

In conclusion, it has been calculated that to respond to Requests 2 and 3 would be over the 18 hour cost limit.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed. 

Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit. 

We can respond to the following within the appropriate limit:

• Request 1A, B, C and D.
• We can provide the total amount of compensation paid out in the last 12 months for custody related incidents.

Submission of a refined request would be treated as a new request, and considered in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, including consideration of relevant Part II exemptions.