Bike Thefts

Request Number: FOI/15560

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Burglary and Theft

Subject: Bike 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
How many bike thefts have been reported for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial years instead of calendar years, please indicate.

Request 2 
How many of these stolen bikes have been recovered and returned to their owners? Please provide the response for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial years instead of calendar years, please indicate.

Request 3 
How many arrests/convictions have there been relating to the stolen bikes? Please provide the response for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial years instead of calendar years, please indicate.

Answers 1-3 
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.

For Request 3 alone in order to determine whether one of the recorded offences resulted in an arrest would require manual examination of each record. There were around 3,500 recorded offences during this period. At a very conservative estimate of taking 8 minutes to review each record, this would take 467 hours to manually review all 3,500 records, therefore grossly exceeding the legislative timeframe of 18 hours.

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. 

• The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) can advise with regards to Request 1 -Information on the number of bicycle theft offences is published in the spreadsheets which accompany our recorded crime bulletins.  Figures up to March 2025 are published in our Financial Year bulletin, and figures for the current financial year to date are published in the monthly update bulletins.  These documents are published on the PSNI website: 
  https://www.psni.police.uk/about-us/our-publications-and-reports/official-statistics
• In regards to Request 2 PSNI may be able to provide within cost the figures for the number of recorded bicycle theft offences where property described as ‘bicycle’ was classified as both ‘stolen’ and ‘recovered’.
• For Request 3 PSNI may be able to provide the number of arrests for bicycle theft, but this will be a separate data series.  This is due to things like the counting rules and when arrests take place in relation to the underlying offence for example the arrest takes place in a later time period than the crime was recorded.

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.