SIA licences suspended in 2022 for inappropriate sexual behaviour or assault
Published 17 February 2023
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1. Request
How many SIA licences were suspended in the calendar year of 2022 due to inappropriate sexual behaviour or assault?
2. Response
I can confirm that this email will constitute a refusal to deal with your request for the reasons I will set out below.
2.1 Exceeding the appropriate cost limit
Section 12(1) – (4) of the Freedom of Information Act allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to comply with the request in its entirety or to confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. In the case of a public authority such as the SIA, the appropriate cost limit is £450.
The ICO guidance ‘The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004’ sets out how a public authority should estimate whether the work required to obtain information is reasonable and appropriate. In the case of requests that would require work on the part of public authority staff, this is estimated at a rate of £25 per person per hour. This means that 18 hours is considered the appropriate limit.
Reporting limitations within the database where information on suspended licences is held means that the information in respect of inappropriate sexual behaviour or assault cannot instantly be isolated and retrieved. Each one of the suspended licences would need to be manually interrogated to retrieve the specific information you have requested. To consider each case over the one-year period (calendar year 2022) would significantly exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours and appropriate cost limit of £450.
2.2 What information can we provide?
For the calendar year of 2022, a total of 954 licences were suspended by the SIA.
2.3 Next steps
In order to better facilitate your request, I suggest that you limit the scope of your request, so that we can manually search each suspended licence until the appropriate cost limit is reached. Given that this will be a very time intensive exercise to manually look at each case and filter out those licence which were suspended due to inappropriate sexual behaviour or assault, I would ask that you limit your search to a particular month within the period that you are interested in.
The SIA will search as many cases as possible up to the appropriate cost limit within this reduced timeframe. If we are able to search the cases well within the appropriate cost limit we will get in touch and request that you provide us with details of a further month that you would like to be searched.
I would be grateful if you could confirm your position in respect of this FOIA request and whether you would like assistance in trying to refine the scope of your request.
[Reference: FOI 0391]