FOI 617/26
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please provide the following information for the period 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2025:
The number of recorded offences, investigations, or incidents relating to:
- a) cannabis cultivation, cannabis production, cannabis farms, or cannabis factories.
- b) keeping or managing a brothel (Home Office offence code 024/19).
Where possible, please state whether the premises relating to the offences/investigations/incidents were classified as residential or commercial; the property type (e.g. private dwelling, flat, HMO, social housing, industrial unit, retail premises, hotel, short-term let); whether the premises were owner-occupied, privately rented, socially rented, or of unknown tenure.
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 request, the following exemption applies:
Section 12(1) – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit.
A search has been completed using our crime and incident recoding system (Niche RMS) for all offences recorded using the following Home Office Codes between 1st January 2020 and 31st December 2025:
- 24/24/19/SX56123: Keep / Manage a brothel used for prostitution. (SOA2003 S55)
- 92A/92/21/MD71531: Cannabis: Production of/or being concerned in production of a Class B controlled drug
This search revealed 1116 occurrences.
We estimate that it would take between 2-3 minutes to interrogate each occurrence to determine the detailed premises related elements of the request.
We therefore estimate it would take in excess of 46.5 hours to retrieve the information.
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 significantly reduce the time frame, then we may be able to assist with your request.