Money spent by police on boarding up and locksmith services
Freedom of information request reference no: 01.FOI.23.028335
I note you seek access to the following information:
Please could I request the total amount spent by the force on boarding up and locksmith services in the last three completed financial years?
If possible, please could you detail how much of this spending was linked to forced entry into properties.
Decision
I have today decided to disclose the located information to you in full.
Please find below information pursuant to your request above.
Q1 - Please could I request the total amount spent by the force on boarding up and locksmith services in the last three completed financial years?
Please see table below. Please note: Locksmith services would be included within the ‘Emergency Boarding Up services’ subjective.
| Total amount spent by the MPS for Emergency Boarding Up services by financial year | |
| Financial Year | Expenditure |
| 2019/20 | £473,349.00 |
| 2020/21 | £442,762.00 |
| 2021/22 | £444,462.30 |
If possible, please could you detail how much of this spending was linked to forced entry into properties.
Please be advised that we were unable to locate information in response to your second question, because the information is not held in a readily retrievable format. This is because there is no flag on the MPS Computer Aided Despatch (CAD) system, to allow us to search for incident records where there was ‘forced entry’. It would therefore be necessary for a member of staff to read every CAD record we hold for the date range you are interested in to identify any records where ‘forced entry’ was mentioned. Any relevant records would then need to be cross referenced with records held by HQ finance, to identify individual costs, and calculate total costs.
As thousands of CADs are created every day this work would far exceed the appropriate cost limit under the Act and would attract the exemption provided by Section 12 of the Act. Where Section 12 is applied this would normally lead to an entire request being refused, however, as you have given a proviso for us to provide that information only ‘if possible’ I have instead made the decision to disclose the information that has been located and have disregarded your second question.