NFRS 2023 123 - Listed buildings

You asked for:

I am writing to make a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Will you please provide me with:

1. A list of all of names and addresses of all the listed buildings in your coveredarea that have had fires in the past five years
2. The number of listed buildings in your covered area that have had fires eachyear for the last five years
3. The number of fires in any buildings, listed or not listed, that have occurred inyour covered area over the last five years

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate to contact me via email or phone. I will be very happy to clarify what I am asking for and discuss the request.

Our Response:

Answer: - This information is not recorded in an easily retrievable format. To locate, retrieve and extract the requested information requires a manual extraction and cross reference of all listed buildings within Nottinghamshire. Currently our incident management system does not record if a building is ‘listed’. We would therefore need to utilise our Geographic Information System to pull a list of listed buildings and manually cross reference them with the incident system for the last 5 years.

There are around 3831 properties classified as ‘listed’ by Historic England. Between the 1st of January 2019 and the 31st of December 2023 there have been 16424 incidents classified as a fire.

It is estimated that to search one record would take approximately 1 minute which would equate to approximately 64 working hours (for 5 years’ worth of records). This takes the request over the cost threshold of 18 working hours and engages Section 12 (1) of the Act.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 with Section 12(1) of the act being applied.

12.– (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for informationif the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed theappropriate limit.

Should you wish for the Force to continue with your request, a more accurate figure will be provided within a fee’s notice. The cost will need to be paid by you, prior to any further investigation. Please advise if you wish to proceed.

Alternatively, you are invited to refine your request to bring it within the cost threshold however, due to the volume of data and the nature of the questions I am unable to offer a reasonable alternative to extract the requested information.

In accordance with the Act, once one part of the request exceeds the cost threshold the entire request exceeds the cost threshold.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17 (5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.