Legal Costs for Civil Cases

Request Number: FOI/14559

Category: Discipline, Complaints and Legal - Legal Cases and Compensation

Subject: Legal Costs for Civil Cases

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 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:
ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Hello chief constable Jon Boutcher recently said "Between 2018 and 2024, the PSNI resolved 30 challenging civil cases. In those cases we paid out to families, claimants, victims, a total of £25 million, which we are not funded for.

"Of that £25 million, I am told that £7.3 million went to the victims, the claimants themselves; £17.7 million went to the lawyers.”

Request 1
Please provide a detailed breakdown of the £25m paid out by the PSNI.

Request 2
Please confirm how much was spent on the PSNI"s own legal costs.

Request 3
Of that figure, clearly identify how much can be attributed to the PSNI"s Legal Services Branch.

Request 4
Please confirm if legal representatives not directly employed by the PSNI, but working on their behalf, received payment.

Request 5
Identify any individual lawyers or legal firms that received payments and confirm how much each was paid.

Request 6
If none of £17.7m can be attributed to the PSNI, please set out the cost to police, how much was paid and who to.

Request 7
In addition, please confirm if the entire £17.7m was paid to lawyers representing those who brought the civil cases.

Request 8
Please confirm what legal firms received payments and how much was paid in each case.

Request 9
Finally, please provide details of anyone else paid from the £17.7 pot

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.

With regards to Requests 6 and 8 PSNI can confirm, while the information is held, it is not held in a retrievable format and a manual trawl would be required to retrieve the information requested.

PSNI would have to pull records for every year that we have data, analyse the invoices to get a list of cases and then pull individual case files for each to ensure no NDA or other restrictions on reporting the information.

Included in the figures, there have been at least 47 transactions relating to 33 distinct high value cases.  The number of low value cases is unknown at this stage as PSNI don’t keep a separate log of them and we would have to trawl through the finance system to count them.
 
Even for the high value cases, we would have to pull all the transactions, analyse and consolidate them.  There can be multiple accruals and payments per case  - a low estimate would be 30 minutes per year that we hold records for – 180 mins total. 
 
We would then have to get PSNI's legal services to look each transaction up to see which solicitors and counsel were actually paid (there will be multiple per case).  Where we have accrued and counsel have not billed us, we would have to seek an estimate of the costs involved (which we probably would not get from plaintiff’s side).  Where the fees have been billed but are with a costs drawer for review or have been referred to Taxation, we would need to identify the amounts actually billed and compare against accruals.  This would also require review by the senior lawyer in each case to ensure that it doesn’t impact on our negotiating strategy. While most of the later records will be held, many predate our current system being implemented and will mean pulling paper records which are archived, and may even mean contacting the Crown Solicitor's Office (CSO) – a conservative estimate would be 10 mins per case – 330 mins, in some cases, it could be much more.
 
PSNI would then have to check the case file for each case, again potentially needing to confirm with CSO to see if there was any NDA, endorsements or any other restrictions on disclosure of this information – again a minimum of 10 mins per case – 330 mins. Again we may not have this information on file and it could take much longer to contact CSO and check this.
 
Then this would have to be consolidated and reported on, complete with notes to explain where cases haven’t yet been paid and are still accrued. At least an hour for this.
 
In total, a lower estimate for high value cases alone would take approximately 15 hours. The low value cases would be additional to this and would easily take us over the legislative timeframe of 18 hours.

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. 

PSNI can confirm that we can provide information in regards to all other requests if a new refined request is submitted. However, due to the reasoning set out above, we are unable to provide any refinement for Requests 6 and 8.

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.