Received: 17 December 2024

1. I respectfully request that you provide the total amount paid in legal expenses for officers after conviction, imprisonment, dismissal from their force and their period of appeal expiring, including and between the years of 2019 and 2024. All information requested to be from this time period.

2. How many officers have continued to access a legal defence claim that was made whilst serving, after the above had taken place?

3. Please also provide me with the policy that states that an ex-member has continued access to legal protection, after conviction, imprisonment and dismissal. Information to include all forces, especially West Midlands Police.

4. In addition, please also provide the specific offences that officers have been convicted of, for which continued legal expenses have been provided for.

Responded: 16 January 2025

1. The Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) relies upon 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 (know n as the Appropriate Limit). At present, the Appropriate Limit is set at £450. The cost of compliance is to be calculated based on a rate of £25 per person per hour which means that the Appropriate Limit will be exceeded if it would require more than 18 hours of work.

The PFEW estimates that there are several hundred of these types of claims but it does not collect the data requested in an easily retrievable automated way and so, in order to provide the data, it would be a manual process to attempt to extract the relevant information. The PFEW estimates that this would take approximately 45 minutes per file which would far exceed the Appropriate Limit.

2. Please see the above response provided for Question 1 of this Freedom of Information request.

3. The PFEW does hold this data but it is held within an internal document intended to assist our Claims Department when making funding decisions in such matters. The first point to note is that, in order to be a member of, and therefore utilise the services of the PFEW, an officer must be either serving or retired and paying subs to PFEW. Funding for criminal cases is generally only supported if the officer concerned can prove that either they
were on duty at the time and the offence arose out of their performance, or purported performance, of police duty, or if they were off duty, they will need to prove that they were performing police duties at the time of the offence or that the issue arose due to the fact that the member is an officer.  As a rule, once an officer has been convicted in a criminal court, they would be dismissed from their Force and therefore no longer eligible for legal support or funding. At the end of a criminal hearing, the representing barrister provides the PFEW with a report which would include advice on an appeal. For the PFEW to fund an appeal of this nature, there would need to be strong written legal advice in the report stating the special circumstances justifying the appeal and a clear indication on the prospects of success.

4. Please see the response to the first question.