Compensation or ex gratia payments for financial years 21/22, 22/23 & 23/24
Request
1. Please tell me for the financial years a) 2021/22, b) 2022/23, and c) 2023/24 on how many occasions your police force has made compensation or ex gratia payments to individuals whose properties have been damaged during a forced entry that was unlawful (either because the wrong address was raided or because a warrant had not been secured).
2. For a) 2021/22, b) 2022/23, and c) 2023/24 please tell me the total amount of compensation and ex gratia payments paid out to individuals following an unlawful forced entry. Please break down for each year the amount corresponding to compensation payments and the amount attributable to legal costs.
3. Please state the FIVE biggest amounts settled over this three-year period, stating how much corresponded to legal costs and how much corresponded to compensation in each case and the financial year in which it was settled. In addition, please give a brief summary of the circumstances that led to the compensation payment in each of the three cases without revealing personal details, e.g., “officers broke down the door at number 25a when the warrant was for 25b”.
Response
Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
I approached an administrator from South Yorkshire Police’s Legal Services. They reported that regarding your request, these file types would be CAPLP (property damage). To establish the number that only refer to the above, given CAPLP files relate to not only these claims, but also claims for seized items, property damaged, destroyed, lost in property store after being seized etc, so we cannot just run a report to capture only files where property was damaged during a forced entry. However, they ran a report which showed that we have SYP 318 CAPLP files from 01.04.21 – 31.03.24. At a conservative 5 minutes per file this process would take over 26 hours.
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:
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.