Special Constables
Date of request: 15 April 2026
Reference: 15559053
Request
1 – A 12-month review of the number of SCs showing
a. total number, and leavers.
b. Restricted and LOA
c. Number of IPS per month
d. Leaver data where captured and reason for leaving
e. Length of service of the leaver
2 – Rankings SSGT to CO detailing in the last 12-months duties, duty type and time spent completing that duty.
3 -Expenses claimed by SSGT to CO in the last 12-months both duty and non-duty related (e.g. uniform or other expenditure).
4 – Access to the last three years SC surveys and any pulse survey results done within the SC in this time period.
5 – Access to the anonymised post-event feedback from the leadership conference held on 18/01/2026.
6 – Anonymised details of number of complaints submitted by Special Constables submitted since the procedure went live (~2024) and ideally any data captured particularly:
a. Stage
b. Category
c. Outcome
d. Time to resolution
e. Right to be accompanied requested
f. Right to be accompanied exercised
Response
Avon and Somerset Police holds information on the subject of your request. However, we cannot provide a response without exceeding the appropriate cost limit. This is because:
- For question 2 relating to duty type and time spent on each type of duty, the information you have requested is not held in a single, centrally recorded dataset. To respond fully, we would need to ask all Special Constables to provide individual records over the past 12 months for any records they have of duty types and time spent completing them. With over 150 Special Constables, and the absence of a centralised reporting system capturing this level of detail, this would require extensive manual retrieval and analysis across multiple systems and/or paper records.
- For question 3 relating to a breakdown of duty expenses claimed, a full analysis of all expenses submitted by each individual would need to be compiled and then aggregated together in order to identify what the expense was claimed for.
We estimate that completing this review would take significantly more than 18 hours.
Section 12 of the Act allows public authorities to refuse requests where the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit. For police authorities, this limit is £450 or 18 staff hours. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days determining whether the department holds the information and locating, retrieving, and extracting it.
This letter represents a Refusal Notice under the Act.
If you would like to refine your request, we may be able to supply you with some information that may be of use. For example, we would be able to provide information relating to general duty types and total duty hours aggregated as a whole by rank for question 2, and the total duty and non-duty related claims in question 3.
For question 4 you may wish to limit your request to the summary presentations relating to SC surveys.
Consideration will be given to any relevant exemptions, such as Section 40 personal information, in any refined requests. Specific feedback comments would likely be withheld under this exemption. Even with names removed, subjects would be able to recognise comments as their own and would therefore be able to identify that their personal information had been disclosed.
You may also find this information on our website here and here relating to special constables of interest, a previous FOI response about Special Constables here, and here relating to mental health support in a previously published FOI request.