Number of referrals to Children's Services by police for children shoplifting Jan-Dec 2023
Case reference FOI2024/00107
Published 26 January 2024
Request
-The number of referrals made to children's services by the police which have the keyword 'shoplifting' on their case file, between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2023,
- The number of referrals made to children's services by the police which have the keyword 'shoplifting' on their case file, between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022.
Response
-The number of referrals made to children's services by the police which have the keyword 'shoplifting' on their case file, between 1 January 2023 and 31 December 2023,
- The number of referrals made to children's services by the police which have the keyword 'shoplifting' on their case file, between 1 January 2022 and 31 December 2022
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.
The Service Area have confirmed that there is no way to filter referrals received from the Police by the category 'shoplifting', therefore electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested officers would need to manually check the files for each child in care and read the case notes to establish if shoplifting was recorded on their file.
An initial search has shown that case files of 400 children in care would need to be checked for this information in this way, and it is estimated that it would take at minimum approximately 20 minutes to check each file. In some cases where files are larger they would take longer than this to review.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 133 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.
If you have any suggestions as to how your request can be reduced in scope to take it under the limit please let us know.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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