FOI release

Refugees with SIA licences revoked

Published 14 May 2024

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This publication is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/refugees-with-sia-licences-revoked/refugees-with-sia-licences-revoked

Request

Question 1: Please confirm the number of licences that the SIA has granted, over the last 5 years, to refugees who cannot give a complete 5-year-history of their time in the UK. Please give a number for each of the following categories of licence:

  1. Security guard
  2. Door supervisor
  3. CCTV
  4. Close protection

Question 2: How many of these granted licences have been revoked?

Question 3: How many of the people whose licences were revoked have been found guilty in a court of law of carrying out illegal activity whilst displaying their SIA licence?

Response

The SIA holds some of this information.  A response to each question has been provided below in turn.

Question 1

  1. Security guard: 96
  2. Door supervisor: 2,506
  3. CCTV: 148
  4. Close protection: 5

Question 2

  1. Security guard: 1
  2. Door supervisor: 24
  3. CCTV: 0
  4. Close protection: 1

Question 3

This part of the email will constitute a refusal to deal with your request for the reasons set out below.

Exceeding the appropriate cost limit

Section 12(1) – (4) of the Freedom of Information Act allows a public authority to refuse a request if it estimates that the costs of dealing with the request would exceed the appropriate limit. For a public authority like the SIA, the appropriate cost limit is £450.

The Information Commissioner’s Office has set out how a public authority should determine whether the work required to deal with a FOI request is reasonable and appropriate. In the case of requests that would require work on the part of public authority staff, this is estimated at a rate of £25 per person per hour. This means that 18 hours is considered the appropriate limit.

Our information on criminal convictions incurred by licence holders whilst displaying their licences is held in a multi-faced database. This means that information cannot be instantly isolated and retrieved to provide readily available figures.

We therefore need to carry out additional checks on this information to ensure that any data we provide is accurate and reliable. This involves interrogating the system and manually cross-checking information with other databases for the entire period of time in question. This work would significantly exceed cost and time limitations.

Next steps

To facilitate a response to your request, I suggest that you limit its scope.

Given that it will be very time-intensive to manually search our systems for the information required, I suggest that you limit your request to a particular month within the period you are interested in.

We will search for as many cases as possible within this reduced time-frame, up to the appropriate cost limit. If we finish our search well within the appropriate cost limit we will get in touch to request that you provide us with another month that you would like to be searched.

I would be grateful if you could confirm your position in respect of this part of your FOI request and whether you would like assistance in trying to refine the scope of your request.

[Ref: FOI 0502]

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