Received: 2 February 2024

1) How many females did PFEW support in misogyny related cases between 2018 and 2023 

2) How many of misogyny cases did PFEW request information on whether the behaviour had affected more than just the applicant between 2018 and 2023 

3) How many misandry cases have PFEW assisted with 2018-2023. 

Responded: 1 March 2024

The Police Federation of England and Wales ("PFEW") relies on section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 ("FOIA") in response to the above request. This allows public authorities to refuse to comply with a request for information where the cost of compliance exceeds a statutory limit (known as the "Appropriate Limit").  At present the Appropriate Limit is set at £450 by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004 (see Reg. 3(3)). The cost of compliance is to be calculated based on a rate of £25 per person per hour (Reg. 4(3)). This means that the Appropriate Limit will be exceeded if it would require more than 18 hours of work. 

For context, in the years 2018 -2023, in excess of 28,000 claims forms have been submitted to and funded by the PFEW. The claims forms used by the PFEW do not request that a gender field is completed and also do not categorise claims as “misogyny” or “misandry”.  Therefore the data is difficult to extract.  Whilst it may be possible to identify cases suggesting misogyny or misandry as an issue as per the request, this would need to be done by manually analysing the claims forms and facts of the case, to determine whether it could be defined within the terms referred to in this request.  Any such, statistics would then need to be compiled. A manual review would also be required in order to determine, for each case, the date on which it was submitted and the date on which it was decided. The PFEW estimates that a manual review of each form and capturing any relevant information (where available) would take a minimum of 30 minutes per claim file. 

The PFEW estimates that the time required to be invested in attempting to comply with the above request would exceed 14,000 hours, which exceeds the Appropriate Limit.