Number of SIA licence holders with a police caution
Published 11 November 2021
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1. Request
The number of current licence holders that have received a simple police caution within the last 12 months and have retained their licence(s) or had their licence(s) revoked by the SIA.
2. Response
I can confirm that we are likely to hold the information you have requested. This e-mail constitutes a notice of refusal to comply with your request for the reason I will explain 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 and 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. The SIA are therefore refusing to deal with your request under section 12 Freedom of Information Act because compliance would exceed the appropriate cost limit.
The information is not contained in an easily extractable format that can be reported, which means that a manual search of each licence holder’s records would need to be undertaken in order to retrieve the information. The November 2021 statistics show that there are currently 390,687 licence holders.
I am of the view that if your request were re-framed it would not provide you with a meaningful response, but I would be willing to consider a re-framed request and what information could be provided taking into account the appropriate cost limit.
[Reference: FOI 0297]