FOI release

Number of SIA licences revoked after wrongful arrests

Published 1 February 2023

1. Request

1. How many door supervisors have lost licence for wrongful arrest since 2021?
2. How many has lost licence for wrongful arrest?
3. What are the fines in civil court been?

2. Response

In respect of questions 1 and 2, this email will constitute a refusal to deal with your request for the reasons I will set out below.

In respect of question 3, relating to civil court fines, I can confirm that the SIA does hold this information. I can confirm that there has been one civil case within the time frame you have requested that has concluded. The SIA successfully defended this matter and no costs were awarded.

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 ‘wrongful arrest’ could be held means that the relevant information cannot instantly be isolated and retrieved. Each ‘lost’ – or as we interpret, revoked – licence would need to be manually interrogated. To consider each case over the two-year period you have requested would significantly exceed the appropriate limit of 18 hours and appropriate cost limit of £450.

2.2 What information can we provide?

The difficulty in determining what information falls within this request relates to the description of lost licences. We have interpreted ‘lost licence’ as licence holders who have had their licence revoked. We have interpreted ‘wrongful arrest’ as licence holders who have been arrested by the police when they shouldn’t have been.

There are several hundreds of revocation cases that relate to this time frame which means that to interrogate each case to find those that may satisfy this request would significantly exceed the appropriate cost limit. Because we are unsure what you are specifically requesting, we are unable to interrogate these cases at all.

2.3 Next steps

In order to better facilitate your request, I suggest that you consider what type of revocations cases you are interesting in finding out about. You also may wish to provide further explanation about what ‘wrongful arrest’ means to you. I also suggest that you limit the scope of your request, so that we can manually search each case until the appropriate cost limit is reached. Given that it is a very time intensive exercise to manually look at each case I would ask that you limit your search to a month within the period that you are interested in.

The SIA will search as many cases up to the appropriate cost limit within this reduced time-frame. 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 0386]