On 29th December last year I posted on the fact that new categories of assault in the context of domestic violence came into being without there being any statistics to validate their being enacted. Of course there is still no dedicated offence of "domestic violence". Defendants are prosecuted under the various degrees of assault on the statute book. With the prime minister in his recent speech on the subject describing how the incarceration of ever more offenders must stop it would have been thought that the efficiency and terms of the probation service and the study of increasing use of custody suspended would be a matter of priority. As all interested parties now know (and many predicted) the current state of what was once a tolerably efficient national organisation has been emasculated by the arrogance, unthinking and discredited actions of Chris Grayling the most ill fitted and catastrophic Lord Chancellor in living memory. Having offenders allowed to remain in society with a threat that breach of their custody suspended sentences will point them towards their local prison puts a heavy responsibility on that emasculated profession and its reduced workforce. It would therefore be thought that a coherent policy on actions to be taken against those who do indeed breach the conditions of their get out of jail not quite free card would be of prime consideration both to sentencers and probation. That thought would be mistaken. In circumstances such as custodial sentencing, historical statistics are a major part of the socio political arguments being argued by Cameron and other interested parties. Punishment, deterrence, rehabilitation and public protection are all part of the sentencing mix. Suspending a period of imprisonment falls mainly into the deterrence basket with some rehabilitative input and to validate the involved and impending processes, efficiency in such sentencing, one would have thought, would be essential. Those processes should involve knowledge of the numbers of offenders breaching suspended sentence orders and their sentences as a consequence being activated whole or in part. By the grace of the Freedom of Information Act which some in government wish to restrict, may they rot in hell, such questions were recently asked to which in brief the answer was....we don`t collect such statistics in any simple straightforward cost effective format. Considering all the information the M.O.J. does collect about courts, outcomes, times taken, sentencing etc etc it is rather odd that numbers which this observer at least (and no doubt many others) considers of some importance are not collected in a similar format thus enabling forensic analysis. Perhaps this failure is not by ommission but by commission.
The response of the MOJ is copied below.
Freedom
of Information Request
Dear ***********,
Thank
you for your email of *********** 20**, in which you ask for the following
information from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ):
For the last five
years how many suspended sentence orders have been made by magistrates` courts
in actual numbers and as a percentage of all custodial orders?
For the last five
years how many of these SSOs as above have been breached and resulted in the
activation in whole or part of these orders in actual numbers and as a
percentage of all SSOs
Your
request has been handled under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).
I can confirm that the Ministry of Justice
holds the information that you have asked for. However, because the cost of
complying with your request would exceed the limit set by the Freedom of
Information Act, on this occasion I'm afraid I will not be taking your request
further. In this letter I explain why that is the case and I also provide you
with some advice as to how you could refine your request so that we may be able
to answer it.
The law allows us to decline to answer FOI
requests when we estimate it would cost us more than £600 (equivalent to 3½
working days’ worth of work, calculated at £25 per hour) to identify, locate,
extract, and then provide the information that has been asked for.
It may help if I explain that the Ministry of Justice
Court Proceedings Database holds information on defendants proceeded against,
found guilty and sentenced for criminal offences in England
and Wales.
This database holds information on offences provided by the statutes under
which proceedings are brought but not all the specific circumstances of each
case. This centrally held information does not allow us to separately identify breaches
of suspended sentence orders. This detailed information is not
reported to Justice Statistics
Analytical Services due to its size and complexity.
In
this instance, to provide you with the information, we would be required to
contact all Magistrates’ courts in England and Wales and ask them to search
individual case files where a suspended sentence order was given to ascertain how
many orders were breached. To collect and collate the information you require on the
scale you have requested would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ set out in
Section 12(1) of the FOIA.
You can find out more
about Section 12(1) by reading the extract from the Act and some guidance
points we consider when applying this exemption, attached at the end of this
letter.
Whilst you could
narrow the scope of your request in order to try and bring it within the cost
limit, for example by requesting information for a particular court, I would
like to take this opportunity to advise you that it is very likely that any
information that may be held within scope of your request may be exempt from
disclosure under the FOIA under the terms of Section 32 (Court Records).
Therefore it is likely that any subsequent narrowed request could be refused
under Section 32.
However,
outside the scope of the Act and on a discretionary basis I am pleased to inform you that you can view
data on suspended sentences given at Magistrates ‘ courts via the following
link:
Select
and open “Magistrates’ court data tool” folder
You
will be able to view the number of suspended sentences given at Magistrates’
court in England and Wales, from 2004 to 2014. The percentage of suspended
sentence orders can be calculated by dividing the number of suspended sentence
orders by the number of custodial sentences and then multiplying by 100.
I
am sorry that on this occasion I have not been able to answer your request. You
have the right to appeal our decision if you think it is incorrect. Details can
be found in the ‘How to Appeal’ section attached at the end of this letter.
Disclosure Log
You can also
view information that the Ministry of Justice has disclosed in response to
previous Freedom of Information requests. Responses are anonymised and
published on our on-line disclosure log which can be found on the MoJ website:
The published information is categorised by
subject area and in alphabetical order
Yours sincerely
Giovanni
Barbuti
Justice Statistics
Analytical Services
How to Appeal
Internal Review
If
you are not satisfied with this response, you have the right to an internal
review. The handling of your request will be looked at by someone who was not
responsible for the original case, and they will make a decision as to whether
we answered your request correctly.
If
you would like to request a review, please write or send an email to the Data
Access and Compliance Unit within two months of the date of this letter, at the
following
address:
Data
Access and Compliance Unit (10.34),
Information
& Communications Directorate,
Ministry
of Justice,
102
Petty France,
London
SW1H
9AJ
Information Commissioner’s
Office
If you remain dissatisfied after an internal review decision, you
have the right to apply to the Information Commissioner’s Office. The
Commissioner is an independent regulator who has the power to direct us to
respond to your request differently, if he considers that we have handled it incorrectly.
You can contact the Information Commissioner’s Office at the
following address:
Information Commissioner’s Office,
Wycliffe House,
Water Lane,
Wilmslow,
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT
SECTION 12(1)
We have provided below additional information about Section
12 of the Freedom of Information Act. We have included some extracts from the
legislation, as well as some of the guidance we use when applying it. We hope
you find this information useful.
The legislation
Section 1: Right of Access
to information held by public authorities
(1) Any
person making a request for information to a public authority is entitled—
(a) to be informed in writing by the public
authority whether it holds information of the description specified in the
request, and
(b) if that is the
case, to have that information communicated to him.
Section 12: Cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
(1)
Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for
information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the
request would exceed the appropriate limit.
(2)
Subsection (1) does not exempt the public authority from its obligation to
comply with paragraph (a) of section 1(1) unless the estimated cost of
complying with that paragraph alone would exceed the appropriate limit.
(3) In
subsections (1) and (2) “the appropriate limit” means such amount as may be
prescribed, and different amounts may be prescribed in relation to different
cases.
(4) The
Secretary of State may by regulations provide that, in such circumstances as
may be prescribed, where two or more requests for information are made to a
public authority—
(a) by one person, or
(b) by different persons who appear to the
public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign,
the
estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the
estimated total cost of complying with all of them.
(5) The
Secretary of State may by regulations make provision for the purposes of this
section as to the costs to be estimated and as to the manner in which they are
to be estimated.
Guidance
The
appropriate limit
The 'appropriate limit', for the purposes of
section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act has been set at:
- £600 for central government and
Parliament.
- The hourly rate is set at £25 per
person per hour.
The
following activities may be taken into account when public authorities are
estimating whether the appropriate limit has been exceeded.
- determining whether it holds the
information requested
- locating the information or
documents containing the information
- retrieving such information or
documents
- extracting the information from
the document containing it.
EXPLANATION OF FOIA - SECTION 32 –
COURT RECORDS
We have provided below additional information about Section
32 of the Freedom of Information Act. We have included some extracts from the
legislation, as well as some of the guidance we use when applying it. We hope
you find this information useful.
The
legislation
Section 1: Right of Access
to information held by public authorities
(1) Any person making a request for
information to a public authority is entitled—
(a) to be informed in writing by the public
authority whether it holds information of the description specified in the
request, and
(b) if that is the case, to have that information
communicated to him.
Section 32: Information held by virtue of being contained within
court records
(1) Information held by a public authority is
exempt information if it is held only by virtue of being contained in—
(a) any
document filed with, or otherwise placed in the custody of, a court for the
purposes of proceedings in a particular
cause or matter,
(b) any
document served upon, or by, a public authority for the purposes of proceedings
in a particular cause or matter, or
(c) any document created by—
(i) a
court, or
(ii) a
member of the administrative staff of a court,
for the purposes of proceedings in a
particular cause or matter.
(2) Information held by a public authority is
exempt information if it is held only by virtue of being contained in—
(a) any
document placed in the custody of a person conducting an inquiry or
arbitration, for the purposes of the inquiry or arbitration, or
(b) any
document created by a person conducting an inquiry or arbitration, for the
purposes of the inquiry or arbitration.
Guidance
Section 32 exempts information contained in those litigation
documents and court, tribunal and inquiry records to which it applies. It
exempts information held by a public authority if it is held solely by virtue
of its being contained in those categories of document.
The information must be included in a particular type of document
and must be held by the public authority only by virtue of this. However, if
the information is so held, it will be exempt regardless of its content and for
the reasons set out below public authorities should refuse the request. This
applies both to the document itself and to any copies of that document or
copies of the information which it contains.
There are separate and specific regimes for access to information
held by courts and tribunals, designed to give those bodies themselves a
measure of control over that information. For example, Rule 5.4 of the Civil
Procedure Rules deals with access to court documents in civil proceedings in
the county courts, the High Court and the Court of Appeal. It allows any
person, on payment of the prescribed fee, to inspect and take a copy of (a) a
claim form which has been served, (b) a judgment or order given or made in
public, and (c) any other document if the court gives permission. Where a
person has the right to inspect a document without permission, a request can be
made to the court staff. Where permission is required, an application must be
made to a judge. The Civil Procedure Rules do not include any guidance on the
court's exercise of its discretion but the court will take account of all the
circumstances of the case and the competing principles of open justice and the
right to privacy of persons who may be mentioned in court documents.
