Child Sexual Abuse Cases

Request Number: FOI/13341 

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics Sexual Offences 

Subject: Child Sexual Abuse Cases

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 (PSNI) does hold some of 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 1
Between the time period January 2023 and August 2024, data on how many days it takes from the initial reporting of child sexual abuse (including viewing of online CSA and CSE images) to case closure (court outcome or no further action) i.e how long does it take from report to court

Request 2
We would like to know how long these people are out on the streets before any conviction (custodial, suspended sentence or release without charge)

Request 3
Ideally broken down for each case but the data as an average for the police force area would be good too

Answer 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 numbers 1-3 would exceed the FOI legislative cost of 18 hours as set by the Secretary of State.

The information requested whilst held electronically on the PSNI’s central database, is not held in a searchable format. Not all the investigations have been closed nor are all court proceedings completed at this stage. It should also be noted that data on court outcomes is owned by the Public Prosecution Service and Courts Service. They do share the outcomes with the PSNI, however this data is not always full nor consistently provided.

Therefore, to provide an answer to your Request numbers 1-3, all the Child Sexual Exploitation / Child Sexual Abuse investigations recorded between 1st January 2023 and 31st August 2024, would have to be manually reviewed to establish if there was a victim or not and, accordingly, how long it took to investigate it and prosecute a perpetrator/s.

The PSNI have identified that in the requested timeframe there have been a total of 3,624 sexual crimes against under 18’s recorded. This alone does not include indecent image offences. At a very conservative estimate of 5 minutes, to review each individual occurrence just to determine the time between reporting of Child Sexual Abuse and prosecution amounts to over 302 hours of work, grossly exceeding the legislative timescale of 18 hours. Further searches would have to be conducted with regard to indecent image offences and district breakdown, exceeding this cost even further.
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.

Request 4
Would also be helpful to know if you have any timescales are set by your force that these cases are supposed to be dealt within

Answer 4
Your request for information has now been considered. In respect of Section 1(1)(a) of the Act we can confirm that the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) does not hold information in relation to your requests. Enquiries made in relation to your request failed to locate any records or documents relevant to your request based on the information you have provided. 

We do not have prescribed timescales to complete investigations.

Accordingly, we have determined that the Police Service of Northern Ireland does not hold the information to which you seek access.

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 system limitations we are unable to offer any refinement to your Request numbers 1-3.