FOI requests sent last year to Police

A little while back I asked all councils in Wales how many FOI requests they answered last year.  It was an interesting one that I enjoyed doing because it shows that there is a lot of interest still in local government and what it is doing. So I decided to ask this to the different police forces in Wales.  The reasons is because it is something that is interesting to know.

So I asked all of the police forces in Wales:

1) How many FoI request did you receive from the time period 01/01/15 to 01/01/16

2) How many of the above FoI requests were answered within the 20-day time frame

3) How many did you refuse to answer

It was the same as the ones that I sent to the council's, really. Again I thought that it would be interesting to ask how many were refused because it shows us which one of them does the most (Which again shows some discrepancies amongst the forces.

So the answers were:

Authority	Amount	Within Time Frame	Refused.
South Wales Police	1114	947	282
Dyfed Powys Police	765	757	163
North Wales Police	881	851	118
Gwent Police	Refused

It never fails to amaze how different authorities give different responses. Dyfed Powys stated in their response that they had a new process which allowed them to answer EVERY request in the appropriate time limit. That pretty good (Tempted to send some really dumb ones now to test that one!).   The reasons that Gwent refused was because they stated that they would have to check all their manual records and then give a response, which would take over the legal limit.

It does show, however, the different administration system that these guys have. All the other three did this in pretty good time, Gwent has a totally different process. What such disparity between them all.  Anyway, think of this, each response that is given must take less than £450 to collect (Worked out at £25 an hour).  If we assume that the average response takes 9 hours to collect (Some over, some under) then the police spent £34,500 getting back in touch with us (2760 responses / 2 *25).  And this is how much they do to keep you informed with what is going.  Pretty good, eh?