Motor Vehicle Fail to Comply Offences 2018 to 2022

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 Section 1(1)(b) is to disclose information that has been confirmed as being held.    

However, where exemptions are relied upon (Section 17 of FOIA), there is a requirement to provide the applicant with an explanation either:  

1. a) stating the fact 
2. b) detailing the exemption(s) in question and
3. c) why the exemption applies (if not apparent).

Information Request 

I would like to submit a Freedom of Information request to access the information for the following offence codes:

• TS16001 Motor Vehicle Fail to Accord Precedence to Pedestrian at Zebra Crossing

• ZP97007 Motor Vehicle Fail to Accord Precedence at a Pelican Crossing

• ZP97004 Motor Vehicle Fail to Stop at Red Light at Pelican Crossing

• RT88970 Motor Vehicle Fail to Comply with Zig-zag Lines at a Parallel Pedestrian and Cyclist Crossing (Toucan)

• RT88970 Motor Vehicle Fail to Comply with Zig-zag Lines at a [Puffin Crossing / Signal-controlled Crossing Facility / Portable Signal-controlled Pedestrian Facility]

Requests:

1. How many incidents have been reported to your force against the following offence codes in the years of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018?

2. How many of these incidents were linked to injury in the years of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018?

3. How many of these incidents were linked to death in the years of 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018?

FOI Duty   

First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request  

Second Duty – See below  

Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request  

Exemption - Section 12(1)  

Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA  

Note – Any links to exemptions within the Freedom of Information Act can be found here: FOIA 2000

Reasoning - In respect of Question 2 and Question 3, Essex Police are unable to respond to the request seeking data reports on offences recorded under those codes that were linked to an injury or death, as it is not held on a central log and is not held in an extractable format on our recording / reporting systems.

Each incident report would need to be manually reviewed which would take approximately 20 minutes per record to establish the facts, to determine whether or not the incident was linked to an injury or death – this would take considerable resource to achieve and, therefore, is regarded as excessive and would exceed the time and cost limits under the Act.

Duty to assist - When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following -   

Caveat: The data is correct as at 11/01/2023.

With regard to Question 1, our Road Policing Unit have provided the following numbers of recorded offences by offence code between 2018 and 2022:

Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete.  However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries.  Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies.  Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.

You may also wish to review our publication scheme as we can provide information on other recorded driving offences. Please see the following collections of articles available via our publication scheme:

Driving | Essex Police

Please note the above request will be included within our Publication Scheme.