Used police vehicles sold by the MPS over the past five years

Freedom of information request reference no: 01.FOI.23.030316

I note you seek access to the following information:

Specifically, I am requesting details of all used police vehicles sold by Metropolitan Police Service over the past five years. The details I would like are as follows:
1. Vehicle registration number
2. Vehicle model
3. The date of sale
4. The mileage of the vehicle at the time of sale
5. The date of the vehicle's last MOT prior to sale
6. The price at which the vehicle was sold
7. Whether the sale was made privately, through an auction, or trade

Decision

I have today decided to disclose some of the requested information. Some data has been withheld as it is exempt from disclosure and therefore this response serves as a Refusal Notice under Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act) by virtue of the following exemptions:

Section 40(2)(a)(b) and (3)(a)(i) - Personal Information

Reason for decision

Section 40 Exemption has been applied because vehicles sold by the MPS, although now no longer organisational assets, they are now private property, therefore, redactions have been made with regard to VRM data in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act to anonymise this data.

A disclosure of any VRM data which refers to vehicles which have since been sold on to private individuals would be a disclosure of personal data, relating to the new owner of the vehicle. A motivated individual with access to the VRM number of a vehicle would be able to take steps to identify the current owner of that vehicle.

A Freedom of Information Act request is not a private transaction. Both the request itself, and any information disclosed, are considered suitable for open publication. This is because, under the Act, any information disclosed is released into the wider public domain via the MPS Publication Scheme and is then effectively available to the world at large and the MPS has no control over how that information is utilised.

Section 40(2)(a)(b) and (3)(a)(i) - Personal Information - In order to apply the Section 40(2) exemption the disclosure of the requested information must satisfy either the first, second or third conditions as defined by subsections 3(a), 3(b) and 4(c) of the Data Protection Act 2018.

The first condition ensures that the exemption would apply in circumstances where the disclosure of the information would breach any of the Data Protection Act 2018 principles.

There are six Data Protection principles set out in the 2018 act and these can be found at section 34.

In this instance I have decided that the disclosure of full details relating to model and full registration must be withheld as release of this data constitutes Personal Data which would be incompatible with the first Data Protection principle which states that the processing (in this case the disclosure) of the data must be both lawful and fair.

Disclosure

With reference to Q’s 1 – 6,
Q1 - Vehicle registration number
Q2 - Vehicle model
Q3 - The date of sale
Q4 - The mileage of the vehicle at the time of sale
Q5 - The date of the vehicle's last MOT prior to sale
Q6 - The price at which the vehicle was sold

- please find attached Excel Spreadsheet with the data requested and redacted as indicated above.

With reference to Q7,
Q7 - Whether the sale was made privately, through an auction, or trade

- please note that all vehicles are sold through auction.