2022/24998 - Cannabis factories

REQUEST

1. The number of cannabis factories found in the last five years.  Please break this down by year.  Please take ‘found’ to mean either those where the factories were still active, or where criminals had been active but moved on. 

2. The number of cannabis factories found in non-residential buildings in the last five years.  Please break this down by year.    

RESPONSE

Notes:

The data provided is based on occurrence recorded date.

The timeframe for the provided data is 01/01/2017 - 01/03/2022. 

The data provided includes all occurrences wherein one or more cannabis plants have been cultivated.

In order to generate the data provided, a dataset was constructed comprising of occurrences under the following offences:

• CANNABIS: PRODUCTION OF/OR BEING CONCERNED IN PRODUCTION OF A CLASS B CONTROLLED DRUG

• CANNABIS (CLASS B): PERMITTING PREMISES TO BE USED FOR UNLAWFUL PURPOSES

In addition to this, an MO search was run on drug-related occurrences for the keywords ‘Factory’, ‘Cultivate’, and ‘Cultivation’.

The resulting occurrences were then manually checked in order to ensure they related to the cultivation of cannabis.

Due to the format of the addresses listed in the occurrence search, determining if a given address is a residential building or not would require a manual investigation for each occurrence. This would put this request over the time limit: 5 minutes x 610 occurrences would equate to 50 hours of research. As such, this information has not been included and a Section 12 Excess Cost exemption has been applied.

Section 12 – Excess Cost

The exemption applicable to the information you have requested for this question can be found at Section 12(1) of the Act and this refusal notice is issued under Section 17.

Section 12(1) “does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.” 

In the case of a police force, the appropriate limit is set at £450, which is calculated at £25 per hour (i.e., 18 hours). Gwent Police would have to conduct a manual search to find and extract the information for this question. This would take more than 18 hours of staff time therefore we are unable to answer this question and the exemption is engaged.