FOI 275 Vetting

Enquiry Reference: 275 - 24
I write in connection with regards to your Freedom of Information request, Below is your
request and our response.
I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 to request the
following information from you.
1. How many police officers are employed by Cleveland Police?
a) Police officer FTE (Full Time Equivalent) is a total of 1514 officers.
2. How many of them have been vetted in the last a) three years b) five years c)
ten years.
a) No information held, we are unable to provide information from 5 and 10 years ago
as everything was on paper as Core-vet did not get introduced until July/August
2019.
3. How many officers have you stripped of their duties after they were vetted in
the past 10 years? This data should be provided on an annual basis.
Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) places two duties on public
authorities. Unless exemptions apply, the first duty at Section 1 (1) (a) is to confirm or
deny whether the information specified in a request is held. The second duty at Sec
1(1) (b) is to disclose information that has been confirmed as being held. Where
exemptions are relied upon s17 of FOIA requires that we provide the applicant with a
notice which: a) states that fact b) specifies the exemption(s) in question and c)
states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.
Having made enquiries within the Force, Core-vet 4 and 5 only recorded rejected and
refused records. It did not record those who have been dismissed and to manually
review this task would be onerous and very time consuming and we have estimated
that this would take in excess of the appropriate time stipulated by the Secretary for
Constitutional Affairs, Lord Falconer on the 18th Of October 2004, that is, eighteen
hours. This falls under the exemption of 'Compliance exceeding the appropriate limit'
covered by Section 12 (1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and as such this
work could not be undertaken.
Therefore, please treat this as a refusal notice under S17 of the Freedom of
information Act.
In accordance with Section 16 of the Act we have a duty to provide advice and
assistance however on this occasion we cannot offer any suggestion on how you
could refine this request.
However, as a gesture of goodwill outside of the act we have provided all the
information retrieved before it realised that this would take over the time specified for
Freedom of Information requests.
4. How many vetting reports have expired and not been redone? How many of
those are for former officers?
There are 56 expired records altogether and 28 which are former officers.
Please note that all statistical data supplied in relation to Freedom of Information requests is
a snapshot of data held at the time the request was received by the Freedom of Information
office and is subject to constant change/updates.
The Cleveland Police response to your request is unique and it should be noted that Police
Forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures to capture and record data
therefore responses from Cleveland Police should not be used as a comparison with any other
force response you receive.
If you are not satisfied with this response or any actions taken in dealing with your request,
you have the right to request an independent internal review of your case under our review
procedure. The APP College of Policing guidance states that a request for internal review
should be made within 20 working days of the date on this response or 40 working days if
extenuating circumstances to account for the delay can be evidenced.
Yours sincerely

Information Rights Decision Maker