FOI 389/25
REQUEST
With cuckooing (“exercising control over another person’s dwelling without their consent to enable the dwelling to be used in connection with the commission of specified criminal activity”) set to become a crime under the new Crime and Policing Bill, I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I’m specifically seeking any data you have on:
- The total number of cuckooing cases reported to your authority between January 2020 and December 2024.
- The total number of confirmed cases of cuckooing within the same timeframe
- The number of cuckooing cases investigated or taken further by your authority
- The number of arrests connected to ‘county lines’ drug offences within the same timeframe
If possible, I would appreciate the data being presented as a month-by-month breakdown for each year in question (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024).
It would also be helpful for the data to be split by towns/areas in a separate table.
RESPONSE
Your request for information has now been considered and I am not obliged to supply the information you have requested.
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Wales Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which:
(a) states that fact,
(b) specifies the exemption in question and
(c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.
In relation to your particular request, the following exemption applies:
Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit.
We have consulted with our Crime and Criminal Justice Department who have conducted a search on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) for all occurrences containing the keyword ‘cuckoo’ within the OEL (Occurrence Enquiry Log) between 1st January 2020 and 31st December 2024.
This search retrieved 5,639 results.
We estimate that it would take approximately 10 minutes to individually interrogate each occurrence in order to establish their relevance and to retrieve the requested information.
We therefore estimate that it would take in excess of 939 hours to answer questions 1 – 3 of your request.
It is estimated that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the "appropriate level" as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In the case of the police service, the appropriate limit is £450 which has been calculated to equate to a total of 18 hours of work.
If any part of the request exceeds the fees limit, then Section 12 applies to the whole request.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a refusal notice.
Excess cost removes the forces obligation under the Freedom of Information Act, however under Section 16 – Duty to provide advice and assistance, an authority is required to offer an applicant the opportunity to redefine their request within the cost limit. If you were to remove questions 1 – 3, we may be able to assist with the rest of your request.