Received: 19 August 2026

QUESTION 1: 

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please provide aggregate information already held electronically about legal funding applications made by Metropolitan Police Federation members between 1st April 2021 and 31st March 2026. 

Does PFEW record the ethnicity of legal funding applicants in an electronically searchable field?

QUESTION 2: 

If it does, please provide the following figures separately for Black applicants and White applicants: 

1. The total number of applications each year.
2. The number recorded as not satisfying the funding criteria.
3. The number referred for legal review.
4. The number where legal funding was ultimately authorised or provided, if this final outcome is recorded separately.

QUESTION 3: 

Please also provide the total across applicants of all ethnicities for each of the categories above. 

Responded: 18 September 2026

RESPONSE 1: 

The Police Federation of England and Wales (PFEW) does not routinely collect this data and does not hold it in a viable retrievable format.  It may be that some ethnicity data is held where it is pertinent to a claim however it would entail a manual search through each individual claim to ascertain this.

RESPONSE 2: 

Please see the response to Q1.

RESPONSE 3: 

We have not provided data separately for the number where legal funding was ultimately authorised or provided as the value will be the same as “number referred for legal review”.  All claims that meet the funding criteria and are approved by the Claims team receive a degree of review by a legal professional.  We cannot distinguish whether this legal support progressed past an initial review or whether it progressed further than that and so, consequently, the numbers are the same. 

* denotes a value less than five and is therefore omitted from our response to protect personal data under Section 40(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.