FOI 854/25

Request

FOI Request: Child Removals Involving South Wales Police

With respect, I ask the following:

I am requesting the following information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

For both of the following time periods:

The entire year of 2013, and

The most recent 5-year period for which data is available,

Please provide the number of incidents (not percentages) in which South Wales Police were involved in the removal of a child from their parent(s) or legal guardian(s), broken down into the following categories:

1. Number of child removals initiated under police emergency powers.
2. Number of child removals initiated by police with the assistance of social services.
3. Number of child removals initiated by social services with the assistance of police.

Response 

The ability to react to incidents of abuse against children is of the highest priority for South Wales Police. We actively pursue every opportunity to identify children at risk, focussing our efforts in making sure victims are appropriately safeguarded through multi-agency involvement and offenders are brought to justice.

Police Powers of Protection (PPP) allow officers to remove children from potentially harmful situations and place them in suitable accommodation.

Please note, this doesn’t always mean that a child is removed from a location. For example, if a parent wants to remove a child from hospital when it’s not in their best interests, the police may use PPP to keep that child in hospital.

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.

At South Wales Police, we monitor and collate statistical data on crimes, incidents and other data relevant to our daily business. The predominant purpose of this is to identifying pattern and trends, so resource allocation and policies can be managed to ensure public safety.

The data you have requested is not routinely collated in the format that would easily answer your query. Therefore, to accurately answer questions 2 and 3, we would be required to individually interrogate 504 occurrences relating to authorised PPP.

We estimate that this would take approximately 10 minutes to interrogate each occurrence on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS).

We therefore estimate that it would take in excess of 84 hours to answer these parts 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 2 and 3 then we may be able to assist with the rest of your request.