FOI 894-2025 / Sep 2025 / Clare's Law disclosures
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 894-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 2nd September 2025 as follows:
Please could you provide the total number of Disclosure Requests made under the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme (also known as “Clare’s Law”)" during the following periods by Gender:
1st April 2022 up to and including 31st March 2023
1st April 2023 up to and including 31st March 2024
1st April 2024 up to and including 31st March 2025
For your ease of reference, please provide the details for the “Person at Risk” that is, the person for whom the enquiry has been made by, directly and/or on behalf of.
Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that not all of the requested information is centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. ‘Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme – Right to Ask’ are recorded on the Crime Recording System as Non-Crime Investigations. Non-Crime Investigations do not have specific ‘roles’ in the same way that crimes have ‘victim’, ‘suspect’, and ‘witness’ roles, that can then be used to generate statistics such as gender. In the case of Non-Crime Investigations, including DVDS, there is no option for recording ‘person at risk’ or ‘person making enquiry’. Instead, there is only one role type, that of ‘involved party’. Any involved party recorded on a DVDS record could refer to the applicant, the person at risk, the subject of the request, or any other relevant party, such as next of kin, child, or even a relevant professional. Therefore, in order to determine gender, it would be necessary to manually review each and every DVDS ‘Right to Ask’ record recorded during the period. We already know from a previous request that for the period 1st January to 31st December 2024 alone there were 532 ‘DV Disclosure Scheme – Right to Ask investigations’ recorded and, at a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per record to review, this would equate to in excess of 44 hours of work just for that 12 month period. Given that your request seeks information relating to a 36 month period, the time would be considerably greater. Therefore, the cost of locating, retrieving, and recording the information requested exceeds 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 this request.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance; 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 in relation to gender, except to suggest reducing the scope of the request to a period of 3 or possibly 4 months.
However, were you to remove the gender element of the request then it would be possible to conduct searches for the number of Right to Ask applications recorded, for the full stated periods.
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