FOI 103-2025 / Jan 2025 / Roadside tests
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 103-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 22nd January 2025 as follows:
Please answer the following questions for the calendar year of 2024, broken down per month.
Q1. How many people who were stopped by your police officers under suspicion of drunk driving and/or drug driving (please specify) passed a roadside breath test but were still taken to custody in order for further drug/alcohol tests to be done? Please tell me the gender, ethnicity and age of each of the motorists who were stopped and tell me the grounds on which officers felt it was necessary to take them to custody.
Q2. How many of the people identified in Q1 passed all further drug and alcohol testing in custody and were released without charge? Please tell me the age, ethnicity and gender of each person and the drug and alcohol tests they had to do in custody.
Q3. Please tell me the exact breathalyser device model your force uses in breathalyser roadside tests (to test for alcohol, cocaine and marijiuna), the name of the company that manufactures the device and send me any reports the manufacturer conducted - that have been sent to your force - that shows the accuracy of these breathalyzers.
Please accept my sincere apologies for the delay in providing the response to your request and for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that some of the requested information is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. In order to determine responses for Q1 and Q2 of the request, it would be necessary to individually review the records for all arrests relating to drink and/or drug driving offences. This would involve manually reviewing the circumstances leading to each arrest, as well as the wider detention log for details of any tests taken and the outcomes, and then collating this information along with age, gender and ethnicity data, where available, for any relevant records. The business area has advised that there were 636 individuals arrested on suspicion of drink and/or drug driving related offences in 2024, and, at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record to review, this would equate to 53 hours of work. Therefore, this would exceed the cost threshold of £450, which equates to 18 hours work at a standard rate of £25 per hour, as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for these parts of the request, and, if any part of a request exceeds the fees limit, then Section 12 of the Act applies to the whole 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 reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to revise these parts of the request into ones that could be provided within the fees limit. I can however advise that it may be possible to provide some information for Q3, should you wish to revise and resubmit this as a new request.
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