FOI 0884-2023/24- Solar installations vandalism

Request:

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am requesting specific information regarding incidents and prosecutions related to ground-mounted solar installations within your jurisdiction.

Please provide the following information for each of the last three calendar years (2023, 2022, 2021):

Q1. The total number of recorded incidents involving ground-mounted solar installations. This includes but is not limited to theft, vandalism, and disturbances directly related to these installations.

Q2. The total number of prosecutions resulting from these incidents involving ground-mounted solar installations.

If your data recording systems do not specifically categorise incidents as 'ground-mounted solar installation' related, please provide the best approximation based on available categories and include a brief explanation of how these categories are determined.

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. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information.

In order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review all crimes for the calendar years 2021, 2022 and 2023 to ascertain whether they specifically related to ground-mounted solar installations which would mean reading through thousands of reports, which 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). We may be able to provide you with the number of incidents within a specified time frame where key words are recorded in the MO Summary field, for example “ground-mounted solar installations” or “solar installations’’. You would be required to provide a list of Key Words for us to search upon. However the accuracy of these results rely on an Officer recording the specific words in the field and it is likely that further manual reads would be required in order to ensure the results fit to your request (i.e. person working at the time of the incident). Please do not hesitate to contact me further to discuss or submit a new request.

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.