2022/25425 - Vehicle Seizures

REQUEST

Under the Freedom of Information Act, I would like to request the following information:

- The number of vehicles seized by the force in the 2021 calendar year

- A breakdown of the number of cars seized above by the recoded reason for the seizure.

- The number of the above vehicles that were returned to their owners.

RESPONSE

- The number of vehicles seized by the force in the 2021 calendar year

4,684

- A breakdown of the number of cars seized above by the recoded reason for the seizure.

- The number of the above vehicles that were returned to their owners.

Unfortunately, we cannot answer this request as it will exceed the 18-hour time limit to complete a request. In order to retrieve the data, each of the 4,684 records would need to be reviewed. It would take approximately 10 minutes to review each individual record, which would equate to over 780 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.

We appreciate that you may be disappointed on this occasion that we are unable to provide the requested information. However, under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, we have a duty to assist you in relation to refining your request, where we may be able to answer some of your questions.

Please Note:

If you would like to contact this office to discuss this matter further, our contact details are on the accompanying email.