I am writing to you under the Freedom of Information Act to request the following information.
1. The number of complains made to you regarding child safeguarding over the past 5 years.
2. The number of these complaints which have been dismissed.
3. The number of complaints which have dismissed where (a) the complaint was vexatious or (b) no evidence was offered in support of the complaint.
I’m referring to any case where you received communication about a named individual making allegations of child abuse, or raising concerns about a named individuals treatment of a child.
We do not hold a central record of this information. Therefore to obtain this information would require a manual review of all communications.
If this request was interpreted as referring to written communications we can confirm that we have received 19, 438 over the last 12 months. We average between 1400 and 1600 Contacts per month (average of 80 per day) for children aged 0 – 18 years of age.
A manual review, allowing 5 minutes per communication, for a 5 year period, based upon an average of 19,000 per annum would therefore take 7,917 hours. This is in excess of the appropriate time limit of 18 hours. We are therefore not obliged to disclose this information pursuant to section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.