FOI 1012-25 Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme

Request:

I would like to file an FOI request for the following data, pertaining to the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (Clare's Law), for each annual period from 2014* - 2024 inclusive.

Within each period that follows, please could you provide:

How many DVDS requests were received within each period?
How many of those requests within each period were fulfilled?
How many of those requests within each period were rejected?
And, if retrievable, reason(s) for rejection?

The periods in question are from 01 January to 31 December (inclusive) within each year 2014 - 2024 (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024).

Response:

Please note, due to a change in systems data is only available from March 2016.

Northamptonshire Police do not record the data by fulfilled and rejected. Disclosures are ‘granted’ or ‘no disclosure’. A disclosure can be made lawfully by the police under the scheme if the disclosure is based on the police’s common law powers to disclose information where it is necessary to prevent crime, and if the disclosure also complies with established case law, as well as data protection and human rights legislation. It must be reasonable and proportionate for the police to make the disclosure, based on a credible risk of violence or harm.

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.

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.

To ascertain the reason for no disclosure would require a manual read of each record which would take this request over cost.

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.

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.