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FOI 0099-2025/26- Drone operations

Request:

Drones:

Q1. Does your police force operate a drone program?

Q2. For each year between 2020 and 2024 how many drones has your police force operated?

Q3. How much money has been invested in your police forces drone program, for each year between 2020 and 2024?

Q4. Do you have a designated drone department or are they allocated to individual officers?

Q5. Is drone training implemented internally or externally?

Q6. How much does it cost to train a drone pilot and how many hours does this take?

Q7. What changes are planned within your police force to better integrate drones in front line policing?

Q8. Does your police force have future aspirations to operate drones as first a responder in line with future legislative changes?

Q9. Does your police force share information with other police forces regarding their drone programs, and its future integration?

EMPASS / Helicopters:

Q10. Does your police force own its own deployable helicopter or use EMPASS / similar program?

Q11. For each year between 2020 and 2024, how many times did your police force deploy the helicopter?

Q12. How much did your police force spend on EMPASS / internal helicopter programs for each year between 2020 and 2024?

Vehicles - For each year between 2020 and 2024:

Q13. How many of your police forces vehicles have been involved in road traffic collisions?

Q14. How much has this cost your force in repairs / replacement vehicles?

Q15. What % of your front-line officers are response driver trained (Yankee or golf using Avon and Somerset terms).

Q16. What is the cost of training a response driver?

Q17. How many hours / days does the course take?

Q18. Is this training delivered internally or externally? 

Response: 

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information.

In relation to Q13 and Q14 In order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review all incident reports for the timeframe requested to establish if it was related to a ‘road traffic collision’ and the associated costs as a result, this would mean reading through over 1000 reports, which would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act. 

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). However, we may be able to provide some information for the rest of the request if you resubmit and omit Q13 & Q14.  If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

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.