Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
We can confirm that Essex County Fire & Rescue Service (ECFRS) does hold the information you have requested.
Questions and final response:
Question 1 - How many members of operational staff have been assaulted by members of the public while attending an incident in the past five years (2019 to 2024)?
Please break the results down by:
1a) Month (e.g. January 2019, February 2019, etc).
1b) Location
Please find attached, a pdf, which has the data requested.
A similar Freedom of Information request was responded to in June 2024, this can be found on our Transparency site, FOI4674 / June 2024 / Assaults on Firefighters 2019 - 2023.
The data provided to you today includes an update for the period 1ˢᵗ January 2024 to 1ˢᵗ November 2024.
Question 2 - On how many occasions has one of those assaulted required short or long- term leave because of an incident?
Please note that one person having two separate leaves of absence would count as two cases.
2a. How many days off have been taken as a result?
2b. How many occurrences led to the staff member being hospitalised?
Please again break this down by month and location."
I can confirm that ECFRS does hold this information, however the information is exempt from disclosure to you.
The exemption applicable to the information is:
Freedom of Information Act 2000 (legislation.gov.uk) Section 12 of the Act - Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit
I can confirm that Essex County Fire & Rescue Service does hold this information, however from our preliminary assessment, we estimate that compliance with your request would exceed the appropriate costs limit under section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
This is currently £450.
This limit is calculated 18 hours of work at a cost of £25 per hour.
The information you have requested is not available because records for any leave that colleagues have taken as a result of an assault is not recorded in a form that is easily accessible.
To provide the data requested would involve interrogating each incident of assault, assess which colleagues were affected, once this is known, each individual leave record would have to be assessed and interrogated to assess if any leave taken subsequent to the date of the assault, was this related to the incident.
We estimate that this would exceed the costs limit
Therefore, we will not be complying with this part of your request.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice in respect of this part of your request.
Under section 16 of the Act, Freedom of Information Act 2000 (legislation.gov.uk) our duty to assist those requesting information, you may wish to request the information for a limited date range, i.e. limit the question to incidents of assaults that occurred in 2024 to date, this would bring the request within the costs limit.
We hope you find this information useful.
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Incident and other data is published on our transparency site. Incident Data (essex- fire.gov.uk).
Please note that the response and data released to you as part of this request will be published on our website http://transparency.essex-fire.gov.uk/.
All requests will be anonymised and no personal information including contact details will be disclosed as part of this process.
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Thank you for your interest in Essex County Fire and Rescue Service, we hope this satisfies your request.
If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request, you have the right to apply for an internal review.
Internal review requests should be submitted within two months of the date of your original email and should be sent to informationgovernance@essex-fire.gov.uk or sent to our postal address: Internal Review, Information Governance Team, Kelvedon Park, Rivenhall, Witham, Essex CM8 3HB.
Please ensure you quote the above reference number in all future communications.