101 Call Outcomes

Request Number: FOI/15984

Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Police Correspondence and Reports

Subject: 101 Call Outcomes

Request and Answer: 
Your request for information below has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) We can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does hold the information you have requested however it is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office guidance ‘Requests where the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit’ in relation to this request, which also provides further detail on the application of Section 12 (1) of the FOIA. This guidance is available on the ICO website at the following link:

Charging a fee and cost limits | ICO

Questions 1 A – F 
Please provide the following information for 2022, 2023, 2024 and the current year 2025. I would like this data broken down by year please.

101 Call Outcomes by Operational Category: For each of the above years, please provide:

a) The total number of 101 non-emergency calls received.

For these calls, please provide the total number (not percentage) that resulted in:

b) The physical dispatch of a police officer.

c) Early Resolution, where the call was concluded over the phone with advice, information, or by logging the incident without a dispatched officer.

d) A referral to another agency or service (e.g., social services, housing authority).

e) The creation of an intelligence log only, without further operational action at the time. 

f) The top 3 reasons for each year on why someone rang 999

Question 2s A - E 
Handling of Low-Level Incidents:

a) Please provide the total number (not percentage) of incidents and crimes reported via 101 that were recorded under the PSNIs "low-level" category (as defined by your internal reporting standards) for each year. For these specific incidents, please provide the breakdown showing the number that resulted in:

b) Officer dispatch.

c) Early Resolution.

d) Referral to another agency.

e) Intelligence log creation only.

Question 3
Decision-Making Policy:

Please provide details of any changes made to the PSNIs policy or guidance for call handlers regarding the escalation and deployment of officers for low-level incidents reported via 101 over the last four years (or the last three, to align with the rest of the request). This is particularly in relation to the criteria used to decide between dispatching an officer versus resolving the issue via Early Resolution.

Clarification Requested
PSNI do not categorise calls in terms of a level. All calls are triaged, with engagement prioritised as either emergency, priority or routine calls. To assist us with answering requests 2 and 3, could you redefine low level incidents?

Clarification Received
Please break it up into routine and priority calls. For emergency, I assume the vast majority of the time they would ring 999.

Answers
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires the Police Service of Northern Ireland, when refusing to provide such information (because the cost of compliance exceeds the appropriate limit) to provide you the applicant with a notice which states that fact.

It is estimated that the cost of complying with your request for information would exceed the “appropriate costs limit” under Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000. Section 12 of FOIA allows a public authority to refuse to deal with a request where it estimates that it would exceed the appropriate limit to either comply with the request in its entirety or confirm or deny whether the requested information is held. The estimate must be reasonable in the circumstances of the case. The ‘appropriate limit’ is currently £600 for central government and £450 for all other public authorities including PSNI. The relevant Regulations which define the appropriate limit for section 12 purposes are The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulation 2004 SI 2004 No 3244. These are known as the ‘Fees Regulations’ for brevity.

Regulation 4(3) of the Fees Regulations states that a public authority can take into account the costs it reasonably expects to incur in carrying out the following permitted activities in complying with the request:

(i) determining whether the information is held;

(ii) locating the information, or a document containing it;

(iii) retrieving the information, or a document containing it; and

(iv) extracting the information from a document containing it.

Under those regulations PSNI can calculate the time spent on each of these permitted activities at £25 per hour (thus if the activity(s) takes more than 18 hours PSNI will be in excess of the ‘appropriate limit’).

When a public authority is estimating whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if the conditions laid out in Regulation 5 of the Fees Regulations can be satisfied. Those conditions require the requests to be: made by one person, or by different persons who appear to the public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign; made for the same or similar information; and received by the public authority within any period of 60 consecutive working days.

Regulation 5(2) of the Fees Regulations requires that the requests which are to be aggregated relate “to any extent” to the same or similar information. This is quite a wide test but public authorities should still ensure that the requests meet this requirement.

Enquiries made in relation to your request has identified that retrieval of information to respond to your request would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

Whilst the information you seek in your request is held on PSNI database, it is not held in a retrievable format. To answer questions 1b, 1d, 1f, 2b and 2d would require manual intervention and a trawl through our systems to gather of all of the information you have requested. 

1b – To determine if an officer had to physically attend an incident would require a check of all incidents that were logged on the system requiring further police interaction, an officer may have been able to resolve the incident via telephone call and therefore did not physically attend, this means that every single call made to PSNI that required police would need to be checked to gather the information you have requested.

1d and 2d – To determine if a referral to another agency was made would require each call to be listened to to determine if the caller was referred to another agency, there is “another agency” code but this does not always reflect referral to another agency and can be used when another agency was also involved in an incident. Each one of these calls would also need to be checked to narrow down specifically which of those incidents refers to a referral made to another agency only. 

1f – Information is not held in a retrievable format and would also require manual intervention. 

2e – it is not possible to have an “intelligence only log” on an incident that has also been graded as a priority or routine call. We have interpreted that “intelligence only log” refers to a ROC (record of contact) or incident that was closed as a RWD (Resolved without deployment)

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter should be considered as a Refusal Notice, and the request has therefore been closed. 

Advice and assistance
You may wish to submit a refined request in order that the cost of complying with your request may be facilitated within the ‘appropriate limit’. In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, PSNI has considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit and can advise the following.

• Questions 1A, 1C, 1E, 2C and 3. 
• Question 2A – PSNI can advise that we do not record incidents as “low level”, however we can provide a response based on ‘how many calls were logged as routine and priority’. 
• Question 2B - “officer dispatch”, PSNI has interpreted this question to refer to ‘calls that were logged for police to attend or make further enquires’. 

PSNI can provide a response for calls that were logged for police to engage further by Routine, Priority or Emergency response. 

However if this question means ‘physical dispatch of a police officer’, this would exceed the cost limits. 

Submission of a refined request would be treated as a new request, and considered in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, including consideration of relevant Part II exemptions.