Kill the Bill Protests (Op Hyacinth)- Protestor Injuries

Response

Your request has been considered and I regret to advise you that your request is refused because we estimate that the cost of retrieving the requested information would exceed the cost limits under the Act which is currently set at £450 or 18 staff hours work. This letter represents a Refusal Notice under the Act.

This is because the information requested in question one could be recorded in several different ways and would involve an extensive search of our files to find and collate it. In order to provide you with the total number of protesters that sustained injuries, we would have to interrogate several different forms of recorded information. For example, officer’s pocket notebooks and officer’s statements of the event. These are not always electronically or centrally recorded, therefore we would have to establish who was present at the time, and manually review their pocket notebooks and / or statements to determine if the information was relevant to your request.

We would also have to review offence reports from the date in question to establish if one protester had reported an injury inflicted by another protestor. These would also require a manual review to determine what information was relevant to your request. All of this information would then have to be collated in a disclosable format, therefore it is estimated it would take considerably longer than 18 hours to comply.

It is also worth noting that if the injured person is not detained or does not report this we would be unaware of any injury occurring. We would also be unaware of any health care sought after the fact.

If you would like to refine your request in order to bring it down to a more manageable level, we may be able to supply you with some of the information you require. This can be done by omitting question one and requesting information on protesters who required hospital treatment.