2022/25077 - Child Sexual Offences Committed Abroad

REQUEST

Please could you provide the following information regarding child sexual offences committed abroad.

1. How many investigations has your force carried out into offences committed abroad under Section 72 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 in each of the calendar years 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 to date

1. How many of these investigations involved offences allegedly taking place in The Gambia?

1. How many of these investigations involving offences allegedly taking place in The Gambia resulted in:

a.) A referral to the Crown Prosecution Service

b.) A charge

c.) A conviction

RESPONSE

Each crime would require viewing to establish where the crime took place and the circumstances of the case, these details may be captured within the log enquiries or case details.  This could mean that a number of different systems would need accessing to obtain further information. 

Unfortunately, we cannot answer this request as it will exceed the 18-hour time limit to complete a request. In 2021 alone, there have been 863 other sexual offences. In order to retrieve the data, each record would need to be reviewed. It would take approximately five minutes to review each individual record, which would equate to 71 hours of research. Therefore, 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.