Your request for information has now been considered and I am not obliged to supply the information you have requested. Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Yorkshire 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 following exemption applies to the disclosure of the information:

Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

I cannot provide this information as it is no longer held in an easily retrievable format, and would involve work by numerous people from the relevant districts manually collecting the data in order to present this information. As we are not required to create new information, this would be above and beyond our duties. Furthermore, as the category for illegal/ legal weapons is a free text field, is not easily searchable, and so would involve a manual trawl of each record to determine whether the weapon fulfilled this category. The cost associated with conducting the above searches is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the (ACPO: Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004) (ACPOS: Freedom of Information (Fees for Required Disclosure)(Scotland) Regulations 2004 and Freedom of Information (Fees for disclosure under section 13)(Scotland) Regulations 2004).

Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act, as a duty to provide advice and assistance, please find the spreadsheet attached. The attached spreadsheet provides information for both 2005/06 and 2006/07, broken down into reason for recovery and firearms type. This information was collated as a matter of course up until May 2007, however as stated above this spreadsheet cannot be populated further.

You may also find the following Home Office website of interest - http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb0207.pdf

I hope the information we have provided is of help to your enquiries and I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your interest in South Yorkshire Police.