FOI 971/25

Request

I submit this request for specific information regarding the stop and search data in the South Wales Police area of responsibility. The information being sought relates to the datasets gathered by various public safety bodies in your area. This information is sought under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA 2000). We are requesting the following data for the year 2024:

1. How many stop and search encounters took place in South Wales?
2. How many police officers were present at every encounter?
3. In addition to data for question 2, please provide data sorted by grounds, object and purpose of the search, legal power used, police outcome, action taken/sanction (if applicable), offence (if applicable), as well as the gender, age and ethnicity of the person stop and searched.

Response 

Your request for information has now been considered and I am not obliged to supply the information you have requested.       

In relation to your request, the following exemption applies:

Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit.

A search has been conducted on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) for all stop and search occurrences recorded in 2024. This search retrieved a total of 4,962 results during this time frame.

We estimate it would take approximately 2 minutes to manually interrogate each occurrence to establish how many police officers were present in every stop and search conducted.

We therefore estimate it would take in excess of 165 hours to comply with 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 question 2, we may be able to assist you with your request.