Protests and Parades

Request Number: FOI/14719

Category: Discipline, Complaints and Legal - Discipline

Subject: Protests and Parades

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
The quantity of complaints made against PSNI officers for their conduct during a protest or a parade, delimited by:
a. Subject-matter of protest or parade;
b. Subject-matter of complaint;
c. Outcome;
d. Gender identity of complainant; and
e. Race/ethnicity of complainant.

Request 2
The quantity of arrests, charges, prosecutions and convictions for protest- or parade-related offences, delimited by
a. Subject-matter of protest or parade
b. Offence;
c. Outcome;
d. Gender identity of person arrested, charged, prosecuted or convicted; and
e. Race/ethnicity of person arrested, charged, prosecuted or convicted.

By a ‘protest- or parade-related offence’, we mean both offences relating to the holding of an unauthorised parade or protest meeting; and offences committed during a protest, or immediately before or after a protest.

Clarification requested:
1. Would the complaints against police include those made to PONI?
2. Can you advise what period of time you are asking about?

Clarification received:
1. The request includes data about complaints to PONI.
2. We request statistics from 1 May 2022.

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.

Since May 2022 PSNI has received approximately 9300 complaints. These are not sufficiently categorised to allow easy identification of those which fall under the parameters of this request, therefore it would be necessary to manually check each individual complaints. At an estimate of 1 minute per complaint, it would require approximately 155 hours to retrieve the data you seek, thus exceeding 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.

It may be possible to provide the number of conduct files during this period, where misconduct relating to a parade has resulted in a formal sanction i.e. written warning and above.

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.