Multi-Agency Emergency Preparedness

Request Number: FOI/14792

Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Police Correspondence and Reports

Subject: Multi-Agency Emergency Preparedness

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:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Request 1
How many multi-agency exercises have been conducted by your organisation within the last 3 years (1st May 2022 to 30th April 2025 inclusive).

Request 2
What proportion of these multi-agency exercises were:
i. Tabletop / Scenario Based
ii. Live Exercises
iii. Other (please state).

Request 3
Please detail how post-exercise findings are fed back into the organisation and how any changes to policies and procedures are implemented as a result of this feedback.

Request 4
What proportion of multi-agency exercises in the last 3 years:
i. Involved more than two CCA 2004 category one responder organisations (please detail)
ii. Involved CCA 2004 category two responders (please detail)
iii. Involved organisations from the voluntary and faith based sectors (please detail).

Request 5
Please detail how the aims and objectives of the exercise are determined and communicated to the parties involved.

Clarification to requester
Could you please provide more clarity on the types of scenarios that you are keen to establish are being exercised as it would assist in narrowing down the search criteria of you request and prevent it breaching the FOI 18 hour legislative costs.

Clarification received
Thanks for your reply. I am interested in any tabletop or live multi-agency exercise within the last 3 years.

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.

The information is not held centrally and to ascertain what information is held and to retrieve it would require a manual trawl of a number of databases, in a number of different departments and branches. Due to the recording system, a manual trawl through a substantial amount of records to retrieve the information sought is estimated, by PSNI, to be over cost.

The business area when estimating the time taken, has taken into account the following four items:

•           Determining if the information is held;
•           Locating the information;
•           Retrieving the information and
•           Extracting the information to be disclosed from the other information.

Consequently to determine what relevant information is held and retrieve it would be over the cost limits.

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.

Unfortunately, there is no refinement we can provide to bring this request under cost.