Investigation into TV show Who wants to be a Millionaire

Request Number: FOI/14698

Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Investigations and Operations

Subject: Investigation into TV show Who wants to be a Millionaire

Request and Answer: 
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 neither confirm nor deny that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does or does not hold the information you have requested. It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. 
This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link: https://ico.org.uk/media/fororganisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Request
I am seeking any documentation, reports, or internal communications held by the PSNI related to investigations or known activity in relation to the TV Show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, between 1998 and 2014. Including, but not limited to:

Request 1
The number and details of investigations opened during this period.

Request 2
Any charges/prosecutions resulting from such investigations.

Request 3
Any available material, evidence, transcripts of court cases or case summaries regarding this.

Answers
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(2) 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.

The information requested whilst it may be held electronically on the database NICHE there is no mechanism to search for information which would relate to this specific the TV show. Whilst within the context of the record it may or may not refer to the TV show, and may or may not be held in attachment these are only searchable by undertaking a manual review.

For information, keyword searches are an unreliable method of collecting data from the Niche recording database because they rely on searching through unstructured data. This means that you cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result and a manual review is almost always be required to decide if the result meets the criteria of the FOI request and retrieval will often exceed the appropriate cost limit.

For unstructured data fields we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search. In addition, we do not have the ability to search for keywords within external documents stored in Niche, so the scope with which we can do a keyword search is limited.

Home office offence groupings are not held in the database. A list of the offences linked to people on each relevant occurrence may be held however there is no explicit link between offences and the fields checked for the keywords so each occurrence would again need to be manually reviewed to confirm if they are related to the request.

To further attempt to ascertain if an investigation took place it would require PSNI to canvas all officers to review their records including official notebooks. Notebooks are recorded in date order and have no index. At present PSNI have over 6000 officers and within the historic time period officers may have left the organisation.

Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, if a public authority estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to confirm whether or not the requested information is held, under Section 12 (2) of the Act, it does not have to deal with the substance of the request.

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 and unfortunately on this occasion we are unable to assist.