FOI 407-2025 / Apr 2025 / Dogs
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 407-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 7th April 2025 as follows:
Q1. The number of reports received by your force about dogs being left in hot cars, broken down by year, from 2020 to 2024.
If recorded, how many of these reports specifically mentioned high temperatures or concerns about heat.
The number of incidents where police officers attended the scene.
The number of cases that resulted in enforcement action, such as warnings, fines, or prosecutions.
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. There is no ‘category type’, ‘tag’ or ‘disposal code’ within the Command-and-Control System to assist with identifying incidents relating to concerns about dogs (or animals in general) left in hot vehicles. In order to provide assistance, the business area have conducted a search of the Command-and-Control System for all incident logs, recorded between 1st January 2020 and 31st December 2024, containing the keyword ‘Dog’, and where the text also contained any of the following words: Heat, Hot, Temperature, Vehicle, Car, or Warm. This search returned 1,245 incident logs, and, in order to determine relevance and then attendance and outcome, it would be necessary to manually review each log. At a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per incident this would equate to 104 hours of work and 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.
However, it is important to note that if there are relevant incidents which have been logged, but where the keywords are not present within the text, then these will not have been returned within the search. For this reason, information retrieved by way of a keyword search cannot be assumed to be entirely accurate and should be treated with caution.
In accordance with section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as 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 that would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce the request into one that could be managed within 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 Unit
Warwickshire Police
PO Box 4
Leek Wootton
Warwickshire
CV35 7QB