FOI 5061-25 Mobile phone and seatbelt usage

Request:

1. Mobile Phone Usage While Driving:

The number of reported offences for drivers using a mobile phone while driving from January 2022 to February 2025.

Including if possible:

Age of offender (e.g., under 18, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+)

Gender of offender

A brief description of what took place (if possible).

- Vehicle being driven

- Actions taken (Fines, penalties, warnings, arrests)

- Injury/Deaths (of offender/victim)

- Damage to vehicles

2. Seatbelt Compliance:

The number of reported offences for failure to wear a seatbelt from January 2022 to January 2025.

Including if possible:

Age of offender (e.g., under 18, 18-24, 25-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64, 65+)

Gender of offender

A brief description of what took place (if possible).

- Vehicle being driven

- Actions taken (Fines, penalties, warnings, arrests)

- Injury/Deaths (of offender/victim)

- Damage to vehicles

Response:

Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom Of Information responses.

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Northamptonshire Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which:

• states that fact,
• specifies the exemption in question and
• states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption

The exemption applicable to the information requested is:

Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

The information you are requesting regarding injury, deaths and damage to vehicles is not held by Northamptonshire Police in any reasonably retrievable form. The only means of establishing information of the nature you are requesting would be by way of manual examination of each RTC record to see if it involved mobile phone/seatbelt. This is a different system to our traffic offence system. 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 usually required to retrieve that information.

It is my assessment that the cost of providing you with the information requested would exceed the 'appropriate level' as set out in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

My assessment is that it would cost 8,471 (number of records) x 5 minutes each (minimum) = over 705 hours at £25 per hour to respond to your request, which exceeds the 'appropriate limit' (currently £450 for 'prescribed costs').

In view of the above, and in accordance with the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please take this letter as a Refusal Notice.

You may wish to refine and resubmit your request so that it reduces the costs shown above and is then within the 'appropriate limit' shown above. (I cannot think of a means to refine the request in order to provide the information you are seeking) but if you would like some further information about how to proceed with your request then please contact:

[email protected]

Although excess cost removes the Force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information, relevant to your request, which was retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded. I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of your request.

The numerical data presented in this response is an un-audited snapshot of un-published data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.

Due to the different methods of recording information across 43 forces, a specific response from one constabulary should not be seen as an indication of what information could be supplied (within cost) by another. Systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. For this reason, responses between forces may differ, and should not be used for comparative purposes.