Statistics

[Name Removed] made this Freedom of Information request to Information Commissioner's Office This request has been closed to new correspondence. Contact us if you think it should be reopened.

The request was refused by Information Commissioner's Office.

Information Commissioner’s Office

Please detail by year between 2010 - 2019 to current date:

1 How many complaints regarding information rights practices were made against police forces, detailing the response data by each police force over that period
2. How many of those complaints against police forces were recorded and investigated
3. How many of those complaints against police forces resulted in sanction/remedial/disciplinary action against those forces and on what basis/nature of breach
4. How many of those complaints against police forces resulted in support of the complainant and on what basis/nature of breach
5. How many of those complaints were lodged against Gwent police and on what basis/nature of breach
6. How many of those complaints lodged against Gwent police resulted in sanction/remedial/disciplinary action and on what basis/nature of breach
7. How many of those complaints lodged against Gwent police resulted in support of the complainant and on what basis/nature of breach
8. How many of those complaints lodged against Gwent police included refusal of an officer to give permission for data to be made available and on what basis/nature of breach

Yours faithfully,

S [name removed]

AccessICOinformation, Information Commissioner's Office

Thank you for contacting the Information Commissioner’s Office. We confirm
that we have received your correspondence.

If you have made a request for information held by the ICO we will contact
you as soon as possible if we need any further information to enable us to
answer your request. If we don't need any further information we will
respond to you within our published, and statutory, service levels. For
more information please visit [1]http://ico.org.uk/about_us/how_we_comply

If you have raised a new information rights concern - we aim to send you
an initial response and case reference number within 30 days.

If you are concerned about the way an organisation is handling your
personal information, we will not usually look into it unless you have
raised it with the organisation first. For more information please see our
webpage ‘raising a concern with an organisation’ (go to our homepage and
follow the link ‘for the public’). You can also call the number below.

If you have requested advice - we aim to respond within 14 days. 

If your correspondence relates to an existing case - we will add it to
your case and consider it on allocation to a case officer.

Copied correspondence - we do not respond to correspondence that has been
copied to us.

For more information about our services, please see our webpage ‘Service
standards and what to expect' (go to our homepage and follow the links for
‘Report a concern’ and ‘Service standards and what to expect'). You can
also call the number below.

For information about what we do with personal data see our [2]privacy
notice.

If there is anything you would like to discuss with us, please call our
helpline on 0303 123 1113.

Yours sincerely

The Information Commissioner’s Office

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Information Commissioner's Office

12 February 2019

 

Case Reference Number IRQ0819057

 

Dear Ms [name removed],

Request for Information
 
Thank you for your correspondence which we received on 6 February 2019, in
which you have made a request for information held by the Information
Commissioner's Office (ICO). 
 
Your request has been passed to the ICO’s Information Access Team, and is
being dealt with in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000
under the reference number shown above. 
 
As you are probably aware the FOIA provides individuals with the right of
access recorded information held by public authorities. It is important to
note that a release under FOIA is applicant blind and therefore
effectively a release to the wider world.
 
We will respond to your FOIA request promptly, and no later than 6 March
2019, which is 20 working days from the day after we received your
request.
 
Should you wish to reply to this email please be careful not to amend the
information in the ‘subject’ field. This will ensure that your reply is
added directly to your case.
 
Yours sincerely
 

Shannon Keith
Senior Information Access Officer, Risk and Governance Department
Corporate Strategy and Planning Directorate
Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow,
Cheshire SK9 5AF
T. 0330 313 1636  F. 01625 524510  [1]ico.org.uk  [2]twitter.com/iconews
For information about what we do with personal data see our [3]privacy
notice.
Please consider the environment before printing this email

 
 
 
 
 
 

References

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Information Commissioner's Office

21 February 2019

 

Case Reference Number IRQ0819057

 

Dear Ms [name removed],

Request for Information
 
Further to our acknowledgment of 12 February 2019 we are now in a position
to respond to your request of 6 February 2019.
 
We have dealt with your request in accordance with your ‘right to know’
under section 1(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
 
Request
 
In your email you asked for:

Please detail by year between 2010 - 2019 to current date: 

 1. How many complaints regarding information rights practices were made
against police forces, detailing the response data by each police
force over that period
 2. How many of those complaints against police forces were recorded and
investigated
 3. How many of those complaints against police forces resulted in
sanction/remedial/disciplinary action against those forces and on what
basis/nature of breach
 4. How many of those complaints against police forces resulted in support
of the complainant and on what basis/nature of breach
 5. How many of those complaints were lodged against Gwent police and on
what basis/nature of breach
 6. How many of those complaints lodged against Gwent police resulted in
sanction/remedial/disciplinary action and on what basis/nature of
breach
 7. How many of those complaints lodged against Gwent police resulted in
support of the complainant and on what basis/nature of breach
 8. How many of those complaints lodged against Gwent police included
refusal of an officer to give permission for data to be made available
and on what basis/nature of breach.

Our response
 
Publicly available datasets
 
In relation to Questions 1, 2, and 5, the information you have requested
is available on our website as we publish datasets regarding our data
protection casework. Datasets are available back to the 2014/15 Financial
Year. By following [1]this link you can search any organisation you are
interested in to see how many cases have been reported about them.
 
You can filter each column to help you locate the information you are
seeking. For example, reported breaches of either DPA or FOI relating to
the Gwent Police could be found by filtering column N ‘Submitted about
party’ to “Gwent Police”. The nature of the complaint is in column G and
the outcome of cases is listed in column M. Other police forces can be
searched for in the same way.
 
Datasets are available up to the end of 2017 and we intend to soon publish
information for 2018. Although we are behind at this time I can confirm
that we are looking at the first half of 2018 in bulk with a view to
publishing these statistics in the near future. Further documents will
then be published on a monthly basis again.

You can find further information on our data protection case outcomes
[2]here. You can also read more about the action we can take in our
Regulatory Action Policy [3]here.
 
Published regulatory action
 
In relation to Question 3, enforcement action taken by the ICO is
available on our website [4]here.
 
If you tick ‘criminal justice’ in the left hand menu you will see a list
of enforcement action taken against agencies in this sector—eleven relate
to action against police forces.
 
Decision notices in relation to freedom of information cases are available
on our website [5]here.
 
In the left hand menu there is a drop-down menu for ‘more filters’. Here
you can search by authority or by sector. There is a dedicated sector for
‘police and criminal justice’. You can also search by date and can filter
whether complaints were upheld, not upheld, or partly upheld.
 
For more historic records, The National Archives (TNA) has an ‘internet
memory’ section within their own published records in which you can see a
snapshot of the ICO’s website at various stages going back to 2006.  These
snapshots are still searchable, but will not have the full functionality
of the original ICO web page. The two links below illustrate information
held under the previous domain ico.gov.uk, and the current domain of
ico.org.uk (there is some overlap between the two):
 

* For [6]ico.gov.uk (up to April 2015)
* For [7]ico.org.uk (from February 2006 to April 2013)

Information Withheld – Section 12 FOIA
 
In relation to Questions 4, 7, and 8, we are not able to provide you with
the information you have requested.  I will explain in more detail below
why this is the case, but in brief, section 12 of the Freedom of
Information Act 2000 (FOIA) makes clear that a public authority (such as
the Information Commissioner’s Office – the ICO) is not obliged to comply
with an FOIA request if the authority estimates that the cost of complying
with the request would exceed the ‘appropriate limit'. 
 
The ‘appropriate limit’ for the ICO, as determined in the ‘Freedom of
Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations
2004’ is £450.  We have determined that £450 would equate to 18 hours
work. 
 
In relation to Question 4, the question of a finding “in support of the
complainant” is quite subjective and our case management system is not set
up to easily provide us with the type of information you have requested. 
Generally speaking this is not the sort of information we would need for
our own day to day business purposes. 

The system allows us to search for the cases we have dealt with in a
number of different ways, such as by the unique reference number the case
was given, the name and address of the person who contacted us and the
name of any organisation that has been complained about.  We can also
search for cases on the basis of the broad nature or sector of the
complaint, but we can only search on a limited number of fixed criteria.

In order to answer your question we would have to go into each case
individually to look at the specific complaint, correspondence, and
outcome.
 
Having checked our case management system for broad figures I can confirm
that there are over 7500 cases related to your request.

Therefore, assuming that each search of each case would take approximately
2 minutes to complete (and it is certain that some searches would take
much longer than that), this would equate to over 250 hours of searching. 
This is well in excess of the 18 hours which would accrue a charge of
£450.
 
It is for this reason, and in accordance with section 12 of the FOIA, that
we are not obliged to comply with your information request.
 
Narrowing your scope

However, if you are able to narrow the scope of your request we may be in
a position to provide information to you free of charge, if it will cost
us less than the appropriate limit to do so. For example, you can narrow
the scope of the request to a specific police force and consider a smaller
time frame.
 
It is worth noting that in line with our retention policy, completed
casework is only kept for a period of two years. Records are only
preserved on our systems after this period where there is a specific
reason to do so. Therefore, a request for information for a nine year
period (2010 – 2019) will not capture the totality of cases reported over
time. You can read our Retention Schedule [8]here.

I should also point out that any reformulated request you may wish to make
to the ICO will be treated as a new FOI request, and the 20 working day
time limit will begin again.
 
Complaint and Review Procedure
 
I hope this response is helpful. 
 
However, if you are dissatisfied with your request for information under
FOI and wish to request a review of our decision or make a complaint about
how your request has been handled you should write to the Information
Access Team at the address below or e-mail
[9][ICO request email].

Your request for internal review should be submitted to us within 40
working days of receipt by you of this response. Any such request received
after this time will only be considered at the discretion of the
Commissioner.
 
If having exhausted the review process you are not content that your
request or review has been dealt with correctly, you have a further right
of appeal to this office in our capacity as the statutory complaint
handler under the legislation. To make such an application, please write
to our Customer Contact Team at the address given or visit our website if
you wish to make a complaint under the Freedom of Information Act.
 
A copy of our review procedure can be accessed from our website
[10]here.

Yours sincerely
 
 

Shannon Keith
Senior Information Access Officer, Risk and Governance Department
Corporate Strategy and Planning Directorate
Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane, Wilmslow,
Cheshire SK9 5AF
T. 0330 313 1636  F. 01625 524510  [11]ico.org.uk 
[12]twitter.com/iconews
For information about what we do with personal data see our [13]privacy
notice.
Please consider the environment before printing this email

 
 

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