FOI 773/25

REQUEST

Please provide the total cost incurred by South Wales Police in connection with a criminal investigation.

This request covers the period from 2019 to present, and includes:

1. Total personnel hours allocated
2. Estimated cost of staff time (officers, analysts, admin, etc.)
3. Cost of any:
• Surveillance or technical equipment used
• External services (forensics, private labs, consultants)
• Travel, storage, or offsite handling
4. Cost of case management and file handling during this time
5. Any internal assessments or reports on the proportionality or efficiency of the investigation

RESPONSE

South Wales Police does not hold the information in relation to your request. The full costs of specific criminal investigations is not held by South Wales Police. In responding that the full cost of investigation is not held, some additional explanation will be helpful:

• South Wales Police manages its budgets to facilitate statutory returns – this does not necessarily facilitate extracting the cost of policing individual investigations;
• Wales Audit Office and the Police Authority sign off these accounts year on year on an unconditional basis – giving confidence that budgets are appropriately managed;
• To calculate the full cost of an individual or series of investigations would be highly complex and, among other activities, would involve identifying each individual officer or staff member involved (due to the variances of pay scales based on length of service and rank) and then, where such information is retained, dividing this up between the many tasks each officer or staff member would have been working on at the same time;  To locate and retrieve the information you have requested would invoke Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit.
• If rest days are cancelled for officers to work at an investigation, subsequent calculations would then be needed to determine the opportunity cost to the Force, of not having that officer on duty when they take the re-rostered day; and
• A view would then need to be taken as to how much of the costs ought to be deemed business as usual (and therefore not directly attributable to the investigation) and a normal part of day-to-day policing.