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FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 599-2024
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 25th June 2024 as follows:
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience that this may have caused you. Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Q1 to Q9 response: Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 places two duties on public authorities. Unless exemptions apply, the first duty at Section 1(1)(a) is to confirm or deny whether the information specified in a request is held. The second duty at Section 1(1)(b) is to disclose information that has been confirmed as being held.
Section 12(2) states: “…Subsection (1) does not exempt the public authority from its obligation to comply with paragraph (a) of section 1(1) unless the estimated cost of complying with that paragraph alone would exceed the appropriate limit.”
Please be advised that there is no specific identifier within the Crime Recording System which denotes fraud/theft involving Certificates of Sponsorship and no flag or marker to easily identify where this is relevant in relation to a crime. Keyword searches are not carried out routinely as they are not reliable, they will only bring back records where the chosen keyword(s) is present within the MO Description / Incident Summary of an investigation; these are limited free text fields and do not contain all information in relation to an investigation.
In order to determine whether any information is held in relation to theft offences, and then to determine the number and further detail, it would be necessary to review each and every relevant offence during the stated period.
Further, fraud crimes are not sub-classified into categories which would enable extraction of the requested information. Searches were conducted for all offences with a Primary or Included Classification ‘Crime Investigation – Action Fraud: Call for Service’ or ‘Crime Investigation – Action Fraud: NFIB Referral’ recorded between 1st January 2024 and 26th June 2024. This search produced a total of 252 records and, in order to identify whether information is or is not held which would fall within the criteria of the request, it would be necessary to review the documentation for each and every one on an individual basis.
Just taking into account the fraud offences, at an estimate of 5 minutes per record this would equate to 21 hours of work and is therefore, above the amount to which we are legally required to undertake i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ (£450) as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
The time involved when also looking at theft offences would be considerably greater.
In accordance with Section 12(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please treat this letter as the Refusal Notice I am required to provide to you in respect of your request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to refining your request where possible. However, due to the volume of records involved, I am unable to suggest a way to revise your request into one which could be undertaken within the fees limit.
I can advise that fraud offences are now recorded by Action Fraud who do further classify fraud crimes into specific categories. You may wish to approach Action Fraud, as the national fraud reporting centre, in relation to the information requested.
https://www.actionfraud.police.uk/
Q10 response: There is no specific force strategy in place to manage Certificate of Sponsorship fraud investigations and our response is therefore ‘no information held’.
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