PSNI Staff Sick Leave due to Mental Illness

Request: FOI/00013680

Category: Human Resources - Absence

Subject: PSNI Staff Sick Leave due to Mental Illness

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
Total number of PSNI staff that have been and are currently on sick leave due to mental illness from 2019 until December 2024 (two years post covid, two years during covid and two years from all covid restrictions have been lifted)

Request 2
In relation to question one, please specify
-a) Staff members gender.
-b) Location of policing districts where staff were stationed prior to taking leave.
-c) For those that have returned to duty, length of time on leave.
-d) For those that have not returned, length of time on leave.
-e) Rank of officers on leave for mental health related illness.

Request 3
Details of the provisions and mental health services available for PSNI staff, including details of take up.

Clarification requested:
Does your request refer to PSNI Staff only, or both PSNI Police Officers and PSNI Police Staff?

Clarification received:
My request is related to both PSNI staff and officers.

Clarification 2 Requested:
Would you be content with receiving data by Financial Year?
And that the data be broken down by Department/Area rather than District?

Clarification 2 Received:
Yes, I would be happy to receive by financial year.
Yes, I am happy for data to be broken down by area/ department, as long as each area/ department is made clear. 

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.

Unfortunately to answer this request in full would be over cost. PSNI can advise the information requested is not held in a retrievable format that provides the information without manual intervention and a comprehensive search would need to be conducted to retrieve this information.

 Requests 2c and 2d for example would require a manual calculation based on a number of different systems. This manual calculation would need to be carried out for each Police Officer and Police Staff member in the entire organisation.

 There has been 2 hours spent by staff working out a possible method to retrieve and provide the data requested. In addition a further 8 hours of time has already been spent retrieving and collating some of the information to answer your request. It is estimated it would take a further 11 to 12 hours on top of this to answer all parts of the request in full, thus bringing the total time to answer the request to 21 hours and over the 18 hour time frame.

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 may be able to provide answers to request 1, request 2a and 2b, 2e and request 3 within cost. Please note these answers may be subject to exemptions.

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.