FOI 9917-25 Road traffic collision data
Request to Northamptonshire Police:
I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 regarding road traffic collisions within your jurisdiction for the years 2022, 2023, and 2024. For your entire jurisdiction, please provide:
a)The total number of reported road traffic collisions each year for cars / motorbikes / pedestrians / cycling.
b)The five roads with the highest number of collisions
c)The contributory factors (e.g., speeding, reckless driving, driving under the influence, weather conditions, etc.)
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:
(a) states that fact,
(b) specifies the exemption in question and
(c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.
The exemption applicable to the information requested is:
Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
The information you are requesting 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 record for the contributory factors. 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 8,060 (number of records) x 10 minutes each (minimum) = over 1,343 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. We may be able to provide information for a) and b). If you would like some further information about how to proceed with your request then please contact:
Where section 12 applies to a request, it should apply to the whole request, even where only one question would supersede the cost limit. The guidance from the ICO is that the decision on what is important is a matter for the requester and it is not for a public authority to assume what information they would like to receive inside the cost limit.