15^th April 2009

Dear Mr Charlesworth,

Freedom of Information Appeal - Reference A0008/2009

I considered your complaint and request for an Internal Review made under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOI) on 4^th April 2009 in order to review the procedural process made by the Force's Freedom of Information (FOI) team.

Procedural Process

Your initial request was received by West Yorkshire Police on 5^th March 2009 with a response being sent to you on 8^th April 2009. As such this response failed to meet the statutory timescales outlined in the legislation and for this we apologise. Having read the correspondence sent between my office and yourself, it was explained that we have been in receipt of an exceptional number of requests during the current year and as such have struggled to meet the appropriate deadlines.

Your request for an Internal Review asked for an explanation about the delay. Part of this has been mentioned above, but the other reason for the delay was in:

The information had to be extracted (where possible) from various systems and as you'll be aware from our response, we found that we'd be unable to extract some of the information you required as it would entail a manual extraction of the data, a piece of work which would take your request beyond the time limit set in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) 2000. (See Section 12 of the FOIA). I gather from the response sent to you that it was mentioned that it would take staff around seven hours to extract the information for each of the year's requested, which would have taken around 49 hours to complete. Our staff always try to oblige requesters by providing them with the information they require, but it is not always possible to fulfil their requirements. However, wherever possible we would rather provide some information rather than simply refuse the request on grounds of cost as demonstrated by the information we finally provided you with in this instance.

I trust that you find that this response meets your requirement.

If you are not satisfied with this response and wish to take this appeal further you will need to contact the Information Commissioner's Office, quoting this Appeal Reference, the reason for your appeal and the fact that you've already been through the first stage of the Appeals process. The address of the Information Commissioner's Office is as follows:

Information Commissioner's Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF

Telephone: 01625 545 745

Fax: 01625 524 510

Yours sincerely,

Steven Harding

Head of Information Management