Trafficked children 219/2024
FOI Reference: 219/2024
Request:
- Please provide the number of children who have been recorded as trafficked to the UK by your police force.
- Please provide a breakdown of where the children were trafficked from, eg. Romania, Sudan.
- Please provide an age breakdown of the children rescued from trafficking. Please do this by each year eg. 11, 12, 13
- Please provide details as to what the children were trafficked to the UK for, eg. Slave Labour, Sexual abuse etc.
- Please provide data on how many of these children have been returned to their home country and how many have been granted residency in the United Kingdom.
If it is not possible to answer this request in its entirety due to one or more questions exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please answer the ones that do not exceed the limits and disregard the ones that do.
If it is not possible to provide any of the information requested due to the request exceeding the cost of compliance limits identified in Section 12, please provide advice and assistance, under your Section 16 obligations, as to how I can refine my request to be included in the scope of the Act.
Clarification Q:
For what time period are you requesting information for?
Clarification A:
Please can I have the information for the calender years 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Please can it be broken down by each year.
Response 1:
I can confirm that Dyfed-Powys Police does hold the information requested, as outlined below.
|
2019 |
0 |
|
2020 |
1 |
|
2021 |
1 |
|
2022 |
1 |
|
2023 |
1 |
Response 2-5:
I can confirm that Dyfed-Powys Police does hold the information requested; however we are exempting part of the information as we believe that the following exemption is relevant:
Section 40(2) Personal Information
Section 40(2) is a class-based absolute exemption. This means that the legislators when writing the legislation considered that the release of such information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 would cause harm to the public authority or individual concerned. There is therefore no requirement to carry out a HARM Test in respect of such information. There is also no requirement to carry out a Public Interest Test.
Section 40(2) Personal Information:
Section 40(2) applies to third party personal data and is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 if disclosure, in relation to data subject to law enforcement processing, would breach any of the data protection principles contained within Part 3 - Chapter 2 of the Data Protection Act 2018. Under Section 34 within Chapter 2 “The Controller in relation to personal data is responsible for and must be able to demonstrate, compliance with” Chapter 2. Such information would not be released under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 unless there is a strong public interest. One of the main differences between the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and the Data Protection Act 2018 is that any information released under FOI is released into the public domain, not just the individual requesting the information and disclosure under the Act must be made with that in mind. As such, any release that identifies an individual through releasing their personal data, even third party personal data is exempt.
Personal data is defined under Section 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018 as:
“(2) ‘Personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable living individual (subject to subsection (14)(c)).
(3) ‘Identifiable living individual’ means a living individual who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to—
(a) An identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data or an online identifier, or
(b) One or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of the individual.”
All members of the public including those employed by the force have an intrinsic right to privacy and these rights are protected by virtue of the Human Rights Act, the Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and a public authority must not interfere with that right. Any release of the information subject to the exemption is likely to compromise those rights.
Data Protection Act 2018
Part 3 – Law Enforcement – Chapter 2 Principles Section 35
The first data protection principle:
“(1) The first data protection principle is that the processing of personal data for any of the law enforcement purposes must be lawful and fair.”
General Data Protection Regulation
Article 5 of the GDPR – ‘Principles relating to processing of personal data’ provides:
“1. ‘Personal data’ shall be
- Processed lawfully, fairly and in a transparent manner in relation to the data subject (‘lawfulness, fairness and transparency);
- Collected for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes and not further processed in a manner that is incompatible with those purposes; further processing for archiving purposes in the public interest…
- The controller shall be responsible for, and be able to demonstrate compliance with, paragraph 1 (‘accountability’).”
Dyfed-Powys Police would not want to disclose any information that could potentially identify an individual. In this particular case, to release the locations/ages/purpose/status details in a correlated format and alongside the recorded years of the offence, especially taking into consideration the very low number of offences, could lead to the identification of the individuals involved and to release such information would be a direct breach of Data Protection legislation. Therefore, as a consequence I am satisfied that Section 40(2) Personal Information exemption is applicable to the release of the information.
The Section 40 exemption is a class-based exemption. This means that the legislators when writing the legislation considered that the release of such information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 would cause harm to the public authority or individual concerned. There is therefore no requirement to carry out a HARM Test in respect of such information.
The Section 40 exemption is in part qualified and in part absolute, in the present case it would be absolute as to release the information would breach Data Protection legislation and therefore there is no requirement to carry out a public interest test.
Additionally, Dyfed-Powys Police can neither confirm nor deny that it holds any other information relevant to this request, as the duty in Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 does not apply by virtue of:
Section 23(5) Information Supplied by, or concerning, certain Security Bodies.
Section 23(5) is an absolute exemption and there is no requirement to consider the public interest in this case.
Section 23(5) – Information supplied by, or relating to, bodies dealing with security matters Section 1(1) (a) of the Act requires a public authority to confirm whether it holds the information that has been requested. Section 23(5) provides an exemption from this duty. Section 23(5) of the FOIA states that:
“the duty confirm or deny does not arise if, or to the extent that, compliance with section 1(1) (a) would involve the disclosure of any information (whether or not already recorded) which was directly or indirectly supplied by, or relates to, any of the bodies specified in subsection (3).”
The police service in its’ fight against crime and terrorism may engage at times with the bodies listed at Section 23 of the FOIA and on occasions there may be information provided to police from one of these bodies. As advised above the decision to issue a NCND response is not affected by whether we do or do not hold the information but relates to the consequences of confirming or denying the information is held. The NCND response is used to avoid risks caused by providing inconsistent responses to a series of similar requests where the information may originate from a number of sources and not necessarily a security body.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this represents a Refusal Notice for this particular request.
No inference can be taken from this refusal that the information you have requested does or does not exist.
(This is a response under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and disclosed on 01/05/2024)