22/07/2019 FoIA request via WhatDoTheyKnow:
I would be grateful if you could find the time to provide me with the following information.
How many reported car thefts of Mercedes cars have there been in the MPS area since 2016.
how many of these thefts have been achieved by the thieves using ‘keyless’ technology. whereby they have entered and removed the car, not using the cars keys.
Response:
DECISION
This letter is to inform you that it will not be possible to respond to your request within the cost threshold. This response serves as a Refusal Notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act).
REASONS FOR DECISION
Section 12 – Where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit
Having made initial enquiries in order to determine whether the information you have requested could be located, retrieved and extracted within the appropriate limit of 18 hours stipulated by the Fees Regulations, it became clear that this would not be possible for Question 2. The reason for this is because there is currently no code or flag on the crime recording system for ‘keyless’ or unforced entry. This information would be recorded within the investigation details of the crime report, which are not electronically searchable. Unfortunately these investigation details contain full pages of text, extend over numerous pages, and are not limited in size, depending upon the nature of the investigation and whether an offender/alleged offender was identified.
Therefore, in order for the MPS to determine whether entry into a Mercedes car was ‘keyless’, all of the relevant robbery, burglary and theft and handling offence reports for Mercedes cars over the specified time period would need to be manually reviewed. To give you an idea of the amount of work required to comply with your request, the MPS recorded 11,687 relevant offences within the specified timeframe. If it only took a very conservative estimate of 1 minute to read and extract the relevant information from each of these records, it would take 194 hours to comply with your request.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) advises on using the Fees Regulations ‘Section 12 makes it clear that a public authority does not have to make a precise calculation of the costs of complying with a request. Only an estimate is required … what amounts to a reasonable estimate can only be considered on a case by case basis.’ The ICO further advises ‘where a reasonable estimate has been made that the appropriate limit would be exceeded, there is no requirement for a public authority to undertake work up to the limit.’
We therefore estimate that the cost of complying with this request would exceed the appropriate limit. The appropriate limit has been specified in regulations and for agencies outside central Government; this is set at £450.00. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 18 hours [at a rate of £25 per hour] in determining whether the MPS holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.
Advice and assistance
The ICO have advised that if one aspect of a request exceeds the cost threshold, the whole request should be refused on cost grounds and the applicant given the opportunity to specify which parts of the request are the most important to them.
I would therefore like to provide you with advice as to how you may narrow your request so that it does not exceed the appropriate limit. As explained, it is Question 2 of your request which would exceed the cost limit. Therefore, if Question 2 of your request was removed, this would allow us to work on Question 1. In this instance I have already provided information for Question 1 as part of the costs estimation, however we could break this data down by month, year and vehicle type.
Alternatively, it may help to reduce the geographical area and request data for a specific borough or boroughs that you may be interested in for Question 2, and/or significantly reduce the timeframe to one month or less.
Please note that the MPS is the largest police service and records the most crimes. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 only provides for a free of cost of 18 hours, which equates to the manual reading of approximately 216 reports. This effectively reduces the ability of the MPS to fulfil many FOIA requests where the information requested is not held in an electronically searchable field, simply because the MPS records more than 216 of most crime types in any one year.
Should you have any further enquiries concerning this matter, please contact me via email at foi@met.police.uk, quoting the reference number above.