Civil claims made by members of the public 2019-24
Request
Under the FOI Act, can I request:
a) the overall number of civil claims settled and
b) the total cost in settlement payouts
In each financial year from 2019/20 to 2023/24, in relation to claims made to members of the public.
Particularly, a breakdown of how many of these claims were for malfeasance and the total amount paid in such cases would be useful.
Response
Section 12(1) - Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
We hold information that falls under the scope of your request. However,
locating/retrieving/extracting the information would exceed the cost limit set out by section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
I approached South Yorkshire Police’s Legal Services. The initial search their financial logs showed over 500 payments on civil files. The data you are
requesting is not recorded in an easily retrievable format and to provide the level of data you require would require a manual review of all the records to establish which compensation payments relate to members of the public (rather than organisations, for instance). At a conservative 3 mins per incident this process would take over 25hrs.
In essence, we would have to review and manually check all relevant incidents to extract the level of detail of the cases that met the criteria of your request; this process would take much longer than 18 hours' work.
The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulations 2004 provide that the cost limit for non-central government public
authorities is £450. This must be calculated at the rate of £25 per hour, providing an effective time limit of 18 hours.
Guidance from the Information Commissioner to public authorities is that where one part of a request is reasonably estimated to exceed the appropriate limit then the authority is not obliged to consider or comply with the remainder of the request up to the point at which the appropriate limit has been reached. Please note point 30 of the below link:
Section 16 - Duty to Provide advice and Assistance
Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, my duty to provide advice and assistance to anyone making a request for information.
Although excess cost removes the force's obligations under the Freedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information, relative to your request, retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded.
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 neither does it bind South Yorkshire Police to any commitment that it will release information in such a manner in the future.
Please note, you may wish to refine your request using a shorter time span. This will potentially allow your request to be answered so long as it does not go over the 18 hours.
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.