Asian Gold Thefts

Request Number: FOI/15585

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics – Burglary and Theft

Subject: Asian Gold Thefts

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:
ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/

Request 1
In Northern Ireland, how many incidents of "Asian gold theft" have taken place in 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 to date.

To clarify "Asian gold theft" is the theft of gold from Asian families. Criminals are targeting Asian families knowing that many have gold, for cultural reasons.

Request 2
Please could you specify the number of incidents, and the value of gold stolen if available, per year?

Request 3
Can you break it down by category too if possible for 1) theft from a person 2) residential 3) commercial

Answer
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.

PSNI can advise that there is no specific flag on our database that would allow us to identify gold stolen from Asian families (‘Asian Gold theft’).  To identify this would require the manual examination of all recorded burglary, robbery and theft offences – as there were more than 130,000 such offences between January 2020 and July 2025, this would be vastly over cost (around 10,000 hours).

Even if we were to narrow down the search to only include the offences listed in Request 3, there were around 700 recorded theft from the person, burglary – residential and burglary – Commercial & Community offences where property described as ‘jewellery’ was classified as ‘stolen’. To check through this many records would take around 60 hours, and would remain over cost.  Furthermore, this wouldn’t cover the full range of circumstances where gold could be stolen, or the range of formats the gold can come in e.g. coins, bullion, ornaments, etc. (some of which do not have a specific property category on our database).

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, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit. 

Unfortunately due to system limitations and the reasoning set out above, we are unable to offer any further refinement in this instance.