FOI 15992-25 - Car-related Offences
Request:
I am requesting the following information held by your constabulary for the periods:
• 1 January to 31 December 2024
• 1 January to 31 July 2025 (or 31 August 2025, if available at the time of response)
Please provide a breakdown of the data for each council area or policing district within your constabulary’s jurisdiction, where applicable.
For each council area/district, please provide:
1. Speeding offences – The total number of speeding tickets or fines issued during each period, along with the month in each period that recorded the highest number of offences.
2. Drink driving offences – The total number of recorded drink driving offences during each period, along with the month in each period that recorded the highest number of offences.
3. Car theft incidents – The total number of reported car theft incidents during each period, along with the month in each period that recorded the highest number of incidents.
4. Causes of car accidents – The leading cause of car accidents during each period, along with the month in each period in which this leading cause resulted in the highest number of accidents.
5. Seatbelt-related fatalities – The total number of fatalities caused by not wearing a seatbelt during each period, along with the month in each period that recorded the highest number of such fatalities.
6. Dropped kerb offences – The total number of enforcement actions (tickets, fines or penalty charge notices) issued for vehicles obstructing or parking on a dropped kerb during each period, along with the month in each period that recorded the highest number of such offences.
Response:
Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Northamptonshire Police, when refusing to provide information (because the information is exempt), to provide 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 in is not held by Northamptonshire Police in any reasonably retrievable form. The only means of establishing information of the nature you are requesting in question 5 would be by way of manual examination of each road traffic collision record. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer-run 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. Many road traffic collision records contain large numbers of free text logs, which means that a manual review would be a lengthy process. Records for collisions resulting in fatalities may have in excess of 100 log entries each.
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 38 (number of records for 2024) x 60 minutes each (minimum) = over 38 hours at £25 per hour, which exceeds the 'appropriate limit' (currently £450 for 'prescribed costs'). This is only to respond to question 5 of your request.
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'. I cannot think of a means to refine the request in order to provide all of the information you are seeking, but if you would like some further information about how to proceed with your request then please contact:
Due to the different methods of recording information across 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.
Although excess cost removes the Force’s obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied some information relevant to your request. 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.
Question 1:
The information you require is readily available from the Northamptonshire Police Website – About Us – On the Roads – Safer Roads Public Access System
Please select the Freedom of Information tab on the left side of the web page.
Question 4: Northamptonshire Police do not record the cause of a collision. Officers note what they think causations could be, however this does not confirm the actual cause of a collision.
Furthermore, I can advise you that, as there are thousands of road traffic collisions each year, any attempt to extract data on suspected causes is likely to exceed the cost limit. For example, in 2024, 2700 collisions occurred. If it took 3 minutes to manually identify the cause of each – and it would likely take longer – this would take 135 hours in total.
Question 6: Northamptonshire Police do not hold this information, as parking offences have been decriminalised in Northamptonshire. We recommend contacting the relevant Councils for this information.
The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.
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.
If you decide to write an article/use the enclosed data, we 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.