2022/25512 - Money Found

REQUEST

Please provide me with:

1. The total amount of money found in public and handed in to Gwent Police in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
2. The total number of individuals or organisations who reported the money in those years.

Please divide the above information by:

1. Whether it was returned to the owner, returned to the finder, or other.
2. Who handed it in (e.g., individual, state organisation, private company).
3. Whether the money was in the form of cash, or some other form.

RESPONSE

Unfortunately, we cannot answer this request as it will exceed the 18-hour time limit to complete.    In 2021 alone there were 756 items of Found property recorded on the system, as there is no way to pull the data to identify individual categories it would have to be completed manually.  It would take approximately 3 minutes per record to review which would equate to over 37 hours’ worth of work just for one year.  Therefore, a section 12 Excess Cosy 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.