Speed limits and emergency response vehicles (FOI)

Request

A

Can you advise how many States of Jersey Police vehicles have exceeded the speed limit whilst not on an emergency response.

B

Can you also advise how many States of Jersey Police staff have been reported (warned to attend a Parish Hall enquiry) for exceeding the speed limit whilst on duty.

If it is possible can this be broken down into 15mph, 20mph, 30mph and 40mph speed limits.

I am interested in figures from the past two years to present day.

Response

A

The Road traffic (Jersey) law 1956 gives the following exemption to emergency service vehicles.

Article 21 Limitation of speed:

(6) The provisions of this Article and any Order made under this Article shall not apply to any vehicle on any occasion when it is being used for fire service, ambulance or police purposes, if the observance of those provisions would be likely to hinder the use of the vehicle for the purpose for which it is being used on that occasion.

All States of Jersey Police vehicles (over 40 vehicles) have a device that records the speed and GPS location for each journey. The driver of the vehicle has an electronic identity key which records his / her details on the system for each journey. This information is held for 90 days to allow police to examine a specific journey, should the need arise.

To obtain the information requested, each journey (up to 30 per day for some vehicles) for each vehicle, for the past 90 days would need to be reviewed. Each review involves the download of data and matching the GPS coordinates with mapping software to get precise locations. Then each report must be compared against specific incident logs to see which vehicle was being despatched to which call. This is time consuming for individual journeys. To complete for all journeys over the 90 days would be excessive and well outside the time limit allowed to complete freedom of information requests. This part of the request (QA) is therefore declined.

B

In the past five years, no police officer or staff have been required to attend a Parish Hall or Magistrates court for exceeding the speed limit whilst on duty. Any individual complaint will be examined thoroughly, and action taken if appropriate.

Article applied

Article 16 A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.