FOI Parking Offences York (40-2024/25)

Request

 

For parking offences only - please provide the following

 

Q1. The information officers are required to record

Q2. The database and form they are required to complete and search options.

Q3. The number of parking offences recorded for York and North Yorkshire in the last Financial Year

Q4. The number of tickets issued

Q5. The total of fines due

Q6. Any open data recorded information on all /any of the above, including annual accounts.

Response

Extent and Result 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.

I note, usually parking matters are council controlled so you may wish to liaise directly with them. The Police would only be involved if the vehicle that was parked was causing a hazard. 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 traffic offences to determine if the alleged offence was parking related, we would then need to further manually review these reports to obtain the requested information relating to Q4 & Q5, 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). However, due to the information provided above I am unable to suggest how you may refine your request and still receive the information within the cost threshold.  If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

For full openness and transparency, as a gesture of goodwill outside of the Act, North Yorkshire Police can confirm that the information for Q1 & Q2 is held and is detailed below.

Q1. VRM and description of vehicle. Description of how the vehicle is causing a hazard / obstruction and providing points to prove offence.

Q2. Officers will either use paper based tickets or an online app that has the same information but in electronic form. These offences are processed on a national system called Pentip. Search functionalities are available using these systems.

The information provided above is outside of the Act and there is no recourse for complaint.

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.