Domestic abuse misconduct allegations 452/2026

FOI Reference: 452/2026

Request:

Please provide the equivalent data held by your force for the years 2016 to 2025 inclusive, corresponding to the Metropolitan Police Service publication which I have attached concerning domestic abuse and specifically the following tables from the “Tables – DA” worksheet under the title "Conduct Matters - Domestic Abuse (DA)":

Table – DA 3: “Number of Officer/Staff Allegations of ‘DA’ – by Type”

Table – DA 11: “Number of Officer/Staff Allegations of ‘DA’ – by result against officer/staff”

Table – DA 20: “Number of individual Officers/Staff involved in the DA allegations – by whether they are still serving”

Table – DA 21: “Number of individual Officers/Staff still serving – by if they are subject to ‘Live’ Case”

For clarity, I am requesting each of the same categories, breakdowns and annual figures used in the Metropolitan Police response, but for your force area.

Response:

Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 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. 

Where exemptions are relied upon Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Dyfed Powys Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which:   (a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies. 

I can confirm that Dyfed-Powys Police does hold the information you have requested. However, we are withholding the whole of the requested information since we consider that the Section 12(1) exemption the Cost of Compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit applies to it.  

Section 12 (1) – The cost of compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit 

Section 12(1) states: “…Section 1 (1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.” 

The cost of providing you with the information requested in respect of your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the “appropriate level” as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. It is estimated that it would exceed 18 hours (i.e. minimum of 32 hours) to comply with this part of your request. The regulations can be located @ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244 

The Freedom of Information department has been advised that the information in respect of your request is not held in an easily retrievable format. In light of this and in order to accurately obtain the information relative to your request for the time frame stipulated would involve Dyfed Powys Police accessing and manually reviewing all cases.  

It has been established that there are approximately 800-1000+ cases per year.  

Attempts have been carried out to try searching for the information, but the system will not provide us with DA cases only and allow us to break it down as requested, without building queries into the system or manually checking ten years’ worth of case data.

It has been established that this request would require complex queries to be built and checked in our system (attempting to isolate recorded DA cases only for the last ten years, plus outcome, type, result etc), which Dyfed-Powys Police do not have the capabilities or capacity to do, as this would take approximately 32 hours to complete.

Alternatively, each case would need to be manually reviewed, which due to the large volume of cases/ ten years’ worth of data would take 10-20 minutes to review each electronic case for date, category, result, officer/ staff involved.

Time estimate to complete task = 32 hours 

In accordance therefore with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for the Whole of this request under Section 17(5) A public authority which, in relation to any request for information, is relying on a claim that section 12 or section 14 applies must, within the time for complying with section 1(1), give the applicant a notice stating that fact. 

You may wish to refine and resubmit your request so that it reduces the time shown above to fall within the 18 hours, should you require any further advice in relation to this matter please don’t hesitate to contact the Freedom of Information Unit. Please also be advised that should the request be refined, it does not remove the public authorities right to cite exemptions if relevant. 

(This is a response under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and disclosed on 27/05/2026)