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FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 234-2023
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 2nd May 2023 as follows:
Please can you provide the number of victims of domestic abuse aged under 18 that have been referred into victims support services for the following time periods:
1) 30 January 2021 – 29 January 2022
2) 30 January 2022 – 29 January 2023
On 2nd May 2023 the following request for clarification was sent to you:
Please can you advise if you are asking about referrals to ‘Victim Support’, the independent charity that provides specialist support to victims of crime, or, are you referring to all types of support services that police can make referrals for victims of domestic abuse, such as Refuge, IDVA, Child and Adult Social Care, Education, Health etc. or something else?
On 15th March 2023 you replied as follows:
I am referring to referrals to any support service that supports victims, as set out in Right 4:4 to 4:10 of the Victims' Code.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience this may have caused you. Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that the requested information is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. Whilst the crime recording system does contain a ‘referrals’ field, referrals documented in this section are generally made for a safeguarding purpose, and, as consent is not required for a safeguarding referral, the majority of these will not relate to ‘Right 4’ of the Code of Practice for Victims. In addition, these referrals are recorded by investigation rather than individual, and as referrals to these agencies can be made for victims, suspects or involved persons (such as children in DV situations) it would require manual review of each one to determine the number of referrals made for victims under 18. Furthermore, this is not a mandatory field as so is often not completed. As such there is no specific field within an investigation to record only when a support service has been contacted on a victim’s behalf, as referrals of this nature are made on a case-by-case basis, when the victim consents or asks us to make contact, and details would be documented within the investigation report as free text. The business area has carried out a search for all offences, recorded within the specified time periods, with an included classification of ‘domestic abuse investigation’, and where the victim was aged 17 or under. This returned 550 offences. In order to determine the number of these that mention referrals to any service that supports victims, as set out in Right 4:4 to 4:10 of the Code of Practice for Victims of Crime, it would be necessary to manually review each and every investigation. At a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record to review, this would equate to in excess of 45 hours of work. This would therefore exceed 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 Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. For Police forces in the UK, the "appropriate limit" is up to 18 hours of work on one request.
In accordance with section 12 (1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter is a Refusal Notice for this request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to refining your request; however, due to the volume of records which would need to be examined, I am unable to suggest a way to revise the request into one which could be managed within the fees limit. In relation to referrals made for safeguarding and statutory purposes It may be possible to provide information in relation to referrals made to the following agencies:
However, as the data is not linked to the victim, it would be necessary to manually check each investigation to determine whether the referral was made on behalf of the victim at the victim’s request, and this element may therefore still exceed the fees limit.
Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is as accurate as possible.
Your attention is drawn to the below which details your right of complaint.
Should you have any further enquiries concerning this matter, please write or email the Freedom of Information Unit quoting the reference number above.
Yours sincerely
Freedom of Information Officer
Freedom of Information Unit
Warwickshire Police
PO Box 4
Leek Wootton
Warwickshire
CV35 7QB