FOI - Covid Fines

Request:

I would like to request a list of all fines handed out by police for breaches of Covid regulations between March 23, 2020, and July 19, 2021.

For each case, could the following information be included:

a) Date of breach

b) Location of breach by local police unit/ neighbourhood policing team area

c) brief description of the breach

d) Outcome, including value of fine where relevant

Response:

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information.

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. In order to retrieve all the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review and analyse over 4000 fines. This is due to the fact aspects such as date, description and outcome value are not held in easily extractable format. Reviewing all these record would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act.

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). A refinement suggestion is that we could provide the total number of fines issued by North Yorkshire for the time period requested. If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.