08 September 2016 – 454.2016-17 – Freedom of information requests – Correspondence and meetings with the IPCC

Request

I am seeking disclosure of all emails, letters, meeting notes, briefing notes, reports where Mrs Mulligan, her Chief Executives, or her/his delegated representative, has either corresponded, or met, with officers from the IPCC.

Please disclose these separately for the financial years 2016/17 to date; 2015/16; 2014/15.

It is accepted that the documents disclosed will be redacted to protect personal information but care should be taken to only exclude information in accordance with FOIA S40 (2).

Response

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner (OPCC).

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, is not in an easily retrievable format. In order to provide all emails, letters, meeting notes, briefing notes and reports of any communication between the Police and Crime Commissioner or the Chief Executive and the IPCC, it would be necessary to manually read through all individual emails containing reference to the IPCC to see if it was a direct communication with the IPCC, or a reference to them. It would then be necessary to extract and process those relevant to your request. Following preliminary searches, this would mean manually reading through over 7000 emails for this part of your request alone, and would therefore far exceed the cost threshold allowed under the Act.

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.
Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regard to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). You may wish to offer more detailed criteria to use in relation to email searches.

Many thanks

Liz
Liz Fryar
Collar Number 4437
Legal Officer – Civil Disclosure
Joint Corporate Legal Services
North Yorkshire Police