FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NUMBER: 000075/16
Thank you for your request for information regarding Operation Nutmeg which has now been considered.
Applicant Question:
In 2011 it emerged that around 11,000 criminals who had committed serious crimes before the establishment of the DNA database in 1995 were NOT on the DNA database. The Home Secretary asked police forces to track down these offenders and place their DNA on the database.
- If you have it could you provide me with the numbers that were outstanding when this edict went out to police forces in 2011 and if possible a breakdown of the main crime they were responsible for?
- What progress if any has been made in getting these historical offenders on the DNA database?
- Can you state how many have been traced and a sample taken?
- Can you say how many are known to have now died?
- Can you state how many people with historic convictions for murder, rape and child sex offences have NOT been traced and a sample taken?
NPCC Response:
Section 17 of the Freedom of information Act 200 requires the NPCC, when refusing to provide information by way of exemption, to provide you with a notice which: (a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states why the exemption applies. In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 this letter acts as a refusal notice for those aspects of your request.
Unfortunately, your request exceeds the fees limit as outlined by the Secretary of State in that to ascertain exactly what information may be held by the NPCC would take longer than 18 hours.
Section 12 – the legislation:
The provision of section 12(1) of the Act is engaged in response to your request as the NPCC are unable to confirm what information it might hold in relation to your request because to do so would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ – i.e. the cost limit. Section 12 of the Act provides:
(1)Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that he 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 the paragraph alone would exceed the appropriate limit.
These sections of the Act provide that the NPCC is not obliged to comply with its duties undersection 1(1) of the Act – i.e. our duty to confirm or deny what information is or is not held, and to supply any information held in response to a request – if to do so would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’.
The ‘appropriate limit’ is defined in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004. Section 3 and 4 of these Regulations provide that an authority can take in to account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in relation to a Freedom of Information request in regards to the following four activities associated with handling that request:
(a)Determining whether or not it holds the information
(b)Locating that information, or document(s) which might contain the information
(c)Retrieving the information, and
(d)Extracting the information from a document containing it
The regulations then confirm that the appropriate limit (in the case of a body such as the NPCC) is £450 and that any work estimated or carried out in respect of the above four activities is to be estimated at a rate of £25 per hour.
Therefore, the NPCC can refuse to handle an FOIA request for information under section 12 of the Act if it reasonably estimates that it would take more than 18 hours of work to carry out the above four activities in relation to that request. If the limit is exceeded, there is no requirement for the NPCC to conduct work up to that limit – the limit applies to the whole request and there is not a requirement to answer other parts of a request even if only one area of the request on its own engages the limit.
It is primarily part 5 of your request that causes the limit to be exceeded.
In order to breakdown the information for each offence for murder and rape (excluding sexual offences), which would include those that are deceased, would take approximately five minutes per record. This would exceed the cost threshold by far.
As a gesture of goodwill, I have liaised with colleagues who have provided the information outside of the Act. I wish to stress that this is information provided to you in order to provide assistance and promote transparency. There is no recourse for compliant regarding the quality of the following data:
Operation Nutmeg was a national Police response to ensure the correct people were on the National DNA Database.
The operation was supported by amendments to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984 (PACE) which allowed the taking of a DNA sample from persons convicted of a recordable offence where a previous sample had not been taken, or if taken had failed to provide a profile. These amendments were made in the Crime and Security Act 2010, with sections 1-7 being subject of a commencement order from 7th March 2011.
Research identified 11,993 subjects across England and Wales with convictions for homicide and sexual offences who were not shown as having a confirmed DNA profile on the national database. These subjects had come into Police detention since April 1995 when the DNA database became operational. The operation came to a conclusion in October 2013.
I wish to stress that this excludes nominals residing in Scotland, Northern Ireland or other jurisdictions outside of England and Wales as well as DNA profiles which were held on the national DNA database but not linked to the Police National Computer (PNC). These are known as unreconciled profiles.
- The total Operation Nutmeg nominals was 11,993 against the following offence types:
Murder & Manslaughter
Rape
Buggery and Gross Indecency
Unlawful Sexual Intercourse
Abduction
Indecent Assault
Indecent Exposure
Other Sexual Offences
- Part two of your request isn’t valid by virtue of S8(c) of the legislation. I am unsure as to what information it is you are seeking when you ask a question in relation to progress. The Freedom of Information Act is not designed to answer general questions. As you will be aware, the legislation places two key obligations on an authority that is covered by the Act when they are considering a request for information. These obligations are set out in section 1(1) and stipulate that when the authority receives a valid request (which is defined elsewhere in the Act) that authority must confirm what information is or is not held (S1(1)(a) and, if that information is held, it must be provided to the applicant unless it is considered to be exempt information (S(1)(b).
It is therefore reasonable to assert that if we are unable to meet these obligations under S1(1) of the Act – i.e. in answering a question we are not able to confirm or deny what information is held by the NPCC because none has been requested – we cannot handle that request under the legislation. Such questions would be best handled outside of the legislation.
However, an assumption can be made as to progress by providing the following information for parts 3 and 4. I can also confirm that this Operation Nutmeg has now concluded.
3)Under Operation Nutmeg 6924 persons were sampled and traced under Operation Nutmeg.
4)The number of persons confirmed as deceased is 1696.
5)S12.
Yours sincerely
Sherry Traquair
Freedom of Information Officer & Decision Maker
COMPLAINT RIGHTS
Internal Review
If you are dissatisfied with the response you have been provided with, in compliance with the Freedom ofInformation legislation, you can lodge a complaint with NPCC to have the decision reviewed within 20 working days ofthe date of this response. The handling of your request will be looked at by someone independent of theoriginal decision, and a fresh response provided.
It would be helpful, if requesting a review, for you to articulate in detail the reasons you are not satisfied withthis reply.
If you would like to request a review, please write or send an email to NPCC Freedom of Information, c/o POBox 481, Fareham, Hampshire, PO14 9FS.
If, after lodging a complaint with NPCC, you are still unhappy with the outcome, you may make an applicationto the Information Commissioner at the Information Commissioner’s Office, Wycliffe House, Water Lane,Wilmslow, Cheshire, SK9 5AF.