Dog Attacks – XL bullies

Response

I am writing to confirm that Avon and Somerset Police holds information on the subject you have requested, however, I have to advise you that on this occasion we will not be able to answer your request without exceeding the appropriate cost limit. This is because not every offence has a breed of dog recorded in the offence record. It may be recorded in the text of the report, but to identify this each report would need a manual review. We are aware from previous Freedom of Information requests that for the period of February 2024 until April 2024 alone, there were 200 offences to review. This would exceed 18 hours of work to comply.

Section 12 of the Act makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of dealing with them would exceed the appropriate cost limit, which for police authorities is set at £450 or 18 staff hours. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting it.

This serves as a refusal notice under section 17(1) of the FOI Act.

As part of our section 16 obligation to assist you, insofar as we can retrieve information within the time limit, you may find this link helpful. This provides data insofar as we hold it up until 30 June 2024. This will be updated every 6 months. To reiterate, not every offence has a breed of dog recorded in an easily extractable form.