FOI 1023-2024/25 National Referral Mechanism
Request
Q1. Do you routinely support victims of trafficking and modern slavery to submit a reconsideration request to the Competent Authorities within the National Referral Mechanism (NRM) following a negative Reasonable Ground or Conclusive Ground decision?
Q2. If the answer to question 1 is negative, could you please provide a reason.
Q3. If you are not able to support the individual with submitting a reconsideration request, do you routinely signpost them to other organisations?
Q4. Can you provide the number of reconsiderations requests you have submitted for the year 2023 and 2024? Could you please provide this data breakdown by year?
Extent and Result of Searches to Locate Information
To locate the information relevant to your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police.
Decision
Q1-3. When a request for information is made under FoIA 2000, a public authority has a general duty under Section 1(1) of the Act to inform an applicant whether the requested information is held. There is then a general obligation to communicate that information to the applicant. We believe these questions to be general questions, requiring opinion or judgement, and not based on information held. To explain that further, Section 84 of Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act) relates to recorded information held by a public authority and that it does not extend to providing explanations unless the answers are already held in a recorded form.
"Information is defined in section 84 of the Act as 'information recorded in any form'. The Act therefore only extends to requests for recorded information. It does not require public authorities to answer questions generally; only if they already hold the answers in recorded form. The Act does not extend to requests for information about policies or their implementation, or the merits or demerits of any proposal or action - unless, of course, the answer to any such request is already held in recorded form." (Day vs ICO & DWP – EA/2006/0069 Final Decision)
Q4. No information held.
Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.