Sexual Offenders 2022-23

Request

I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the following information:

1. How many people have been removed from the sex offenders register and then re-offended?

2. How many applications a year are there from people wishing to be removed from the sex offenders register?

3. How many applications are successful each year to be removed from the sex offenders register?

4. Please can you provide the crime(s) of each sex offender who has been removed from the sex offender and the reason given for their removal for the last two years. (By this I mean the offence that led to them being placed on the register).

Please provide the information in a yearly breakdown. (2022 and 2023). Please give the date of removal and date of offence for each person removed.

If it is not possible to answer this request in its entirety due to one or more questions exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please answer the ones that do not exceed the limits and disregard the ones that do.

If it is not possible to provide any of the information requested due to the request exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under your Section 16 obligations, as to how I can refine my request to be included in the scope of the Act.

In any case, if you can identify ways that my request could be refined please provide further advice and assistance to indicate this.

Response

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 40 (2) – Personal Information

This is an absolute exemption and therefore a Public Interest Test is not relevant. However, for clarity, I will explain my rationale for engaging this exemption.

Section 40(2) provides that information is exempt if it is the personal data of
someone other than the applicant and disclosure would breach any of the data
protection principles. The term ‘personal data’ means data that relates to a living individual who can be identified. This may take an obvious form of ‘personal information’ such as a name but can also include information which, if aggregated, can pinpoint an individual. Due to each one being different and specific to the individual and may include details of how risk is managed by the forces, tools of management etc, full disclosure may potentially identify individuals involved and would breach data protection principles. Therefore, I have not provided the reasons for the removal of each person.

However, I am happy to supply you with some data to assist your research.

We approached the administrator for South Yorkshire Police’s Visor Team, who
provided us with the following information:

1. 0

2. 2022 x 13
    2023 x 17

3. 2022 x 9
    2023 x 7

4. 2022:

a. Indecent assault on female under 16
b. Gross indecency with a child (girl)
c. Indecent assault on female 16 or over
d. Indecent assault on male under 16
e. Indecent assault on male under 14
f. Buggery (with a boy under 16)
g. Indecent assault on male under 14
h. Indecent assault on female under 23
i. Possessing an indecent photograph of a child

Corresponding dates re the above:

a. Offence date 17/05/1999 removal date 31/05/2022
b. Offence date 01/01/2003 removal date 12/07/2022
c. Offence date 01/08/2001 removal date 27/04/2022
d. Offence date 15/02/2004 removal date 12/07/2022
e. Offence date 03/04/1991 removal date 26/07/2022
f. Offence date 10/10/1982 removal date 10/10/2022
g. Offence date 01/11/1995 removal date 23/02/2023 (application received in
2022)
h. Offence date 09/02/1988 removal date 21/10/2022

2023:

a. Indecent assault on female under 14
b. Rape
c. Assault on female by penetration
d. Indecent assault on male under 14
e. Distributing indecent photographs of children
f. Indecent assault on female under 14
g. Indecent assault on female under 14

Corresponding dates re the above:

a. Offence date 28/05/1970 removal date 21/06/2023
b. Offence date 03/01/2000 removal date 21/07/2023
c. Offence date 27/09/2005 removal date 06/12/2023
d. Offence date 26/06/1996 removal date 11/10/2023
e. Offence date 10/01/2002 removal date 29/08/2023
f. Offence date 01/01/1998 removal date 12/12/2023
g. Offence date 02/01/2002 removal date 03/01/2024 (application made in
2023)

Please note, every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that data has been extracted from data sources used by this force for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording systems and information assets.

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/data for any requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when those data are used.

Police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may receive from other police forces.