February 06, 2026 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Crime Statistics
Request Number: FOI/16763
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Crime Statistics
Subject: Cases of Cuckooing in last 10 years
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:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf
Request
How many cases of cuckooing have your force dealt with broken down by the following financial years: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
(I note that there is no specific Home Office code for "cuckooing”. However, this data is recorded by some forces including the largest force in the UK. It is also worth noting that in the past forces have searched in Modern Slavery Enquiries for links to potential cuckooing and have been able to find the information within cost.)
(If 2015-2025 takes me over the cost limit, please send as many as possible with priority being the most recent years of data.)
Answer
The PSNI is not obliged to search for, or compile some of the requested information before refusing a request that we estimate will exceed the appropriate limit. The ICO advised that we are not obliged to search up to the appropriate limit simply because the applicant has asked. As set out in their guidance below, a request framed by the cost limit is not a valid request.
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 do not record ‘cuckooing’ within statistics as a searchable term and therefore a manual trawl of the available information would be required to determine whether or not ‘cuckooing’ took place as part of the offence. For example, PSNI record drug offences such as possession, importation of drugs etc. Each offence would need to be assessed and the person(s) within the log further assessed to determine whether or not they are vulnerable and fit the definition. Therefore, a manual examination of every single drug offence recorded during the requested date range would be required in order to retrieve the requested information. For the financial year 23/24 alone, there were 7,710 possession of drug offences. This would be over cost for one year alone, even when focussing on just one specific offence. Therefore this request would be grossly over cost when other offences and the date range requested are taken in to account.
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 the way in which the information is stored, we are unable to provide refinement.