Availability of custody suites & ICV visits

Dear Mr Mery,

Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

We are dealing with this matter and will respond in due course.

Yvonne Peart
Information Officer

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Dear Mr Mery,

Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

The attached spreadsheet has been sent to you in response to your request and was produced following conversations with you to provide assistance and seek clarification. I understand that you are satisfied that this response meets your revised request. Where information has not been provided in response to your original request of 6 November 2011 this is because it is not held by the MPA. You may wish to request any additional information that you require from the Metropolitan Police Service.

If you are unhappy with the service you have received in relation to your request and wish to make a complaint about any of the above decisions you may contact me to arrange for an officer who has not had any involvement with this request to review our decision. If you are still unhappy after that, a further request can be made to the Information Commissioner, who will decide whether the request was dealt with in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. Further information is available on the Information Commissioner's website: www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk.

Yvonne Peart
Information Officer

Sent: 24 November 2011 14:07
To: David Mery
Cc: Yvonne Peart
Subject: RE: Met's occasional custody suites & BTP's CCTV guidelines

Dear David
I have produced the attached spreadsheet based on what I understand your requirements to be based on our conversations, communications and your summary below.

The first spreadsheet in the attached excel workbook gives you everything on our database as downloaded on the 16th Nov and sorted and manipulated to give you the information in the order that I thought would be useful to you - based on what you have said. I think that it is worth pointing out that this is just a download of the information contained. You may find that there are discrepancies between this and information contained in annual reports. This is because the database only reliably provides information found on the Part 1 page of visit report forms and this can be at variance with what is provided by ICVs on the Part 2 pages and, as a consequence, currently our database does not support us in ascertaining the number of detainees who were offered visits but refused to see the ICVs. The panels have traditionally required different levels of information in their annual reports and, speaking for myself, I have always gone through the forms manually to extract the required data. Where there is a difference between the information contained in this spreadsheet and the annual reports I would recommend that you take the annual reports as more reliable.
The annual reports can be accessed via this link: http://www.mpa.gov.uk/partnerships/icv/a...

The other page in the excel workbook gives the stations with custody suites in the Met area according to the most up-to-date information we have here. I have included stations that are now closed in case you see instances of their use in the visits spreadsheet. Again, as I said before, for a truly definitive list of stations and information on cell numbers, cell availability and usage, as well as the through-put and types of detainees per year, you would need to approach the Metropolitan Police Service.

Please feel free to proceed in adding the summary in your previous email and this reply to the public request.

Can I take it that this email, the attachment and our previous correspondence satisfies your FOI request?

Regards
Tony

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