Enforcement action since 01/01/2000
Case reference FOI2025/02307
Received 22 November 2025
Published 17 December 2025
Request
Response
Please could you provide how many enforcement actions were issued against landowners who have obstructed public rights of way, since 1st Jan 2000.
Answer: This information is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested, officers would need to manually check individual files for this information. An initial search has shown that 8,354 individual enforcement jobs would need to be checked for this information, and it is estimated that it would take 3 minutes to check each job file. Once the details had been identified this would need to be noted and once all files had been checked in this way, the total figures requested could be calculated.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 417 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
I can confirm we do not hold information on enforcement jobs before 2013. We can provide a breakdown of the nature of the enforcement jobs.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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