Naloxone in Custody Suites

Request Number: FOI/15261

Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Custody

Subject: Naloxone in Custody Suites

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), 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 to determine if Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) holds or does not hold the information requested by you. We have explained to you below, that when PSNI estimates whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if certain conditions are met. In this case those conditions are met and complying with all of your requests would in our estimation exceed that appropriate limit set out in Regulation. We have explained this further below but also we 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(2) 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

You requested the following information from PSNI:

Question 1
Please could you tell me, from 1 Jan 2022 to present:
If the force has naloxone in its custody suites

Question 2
The number of times naloxone was used in custody by the force

Question 3
The number of patients/arrestees naloxone was used on

Question 4
The number of drug overdoses in custody

Question 5
The number of deaths from drug overdoses in custody

Question 6
If naloxone was introduced in custody suites after 1 Jan 2022, please let me know when.

Question 7
Also, please could you provide information on who administers the naloxone – eg police officers or healthcare professionals.
If you have numerical data broken down by month, then that would be fantastic. If not, broken down by calendar year is fine. Failing that, a total across all requested years would be acceptable if it allows you to comply with my request.

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(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 Questions 2, 3, 4 and 5 have established that even to identify if the requested information is held by the PSNI, would exceed the 18 hour cost limit set by the Secretary of State under the FOI Act. PSNI can confirm that this information would not be held centrally on our Niche database and to locate this information would require a manual trawl through individual case files. Even if we were to trawl through custody records for an answer or partial answer - the number of records yearly is approximately 22,000 to 23,000. If we spent even a single minute per record, this would take approximately 366 hours just for a single year - vastly exceeding 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 advise that although we are unable to offer any further refinement in regards to Questions 2, 3 ,4 or 5, we can answer Questions 1, 6 and 7 within cost if a newly refined request was to be submitted.