October 14, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Crime Statistics
Request Number: FOI/15521
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Crime Statistics
Subject: Crime Statistics by Offender Nationality in Northern Ireland
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:
Question 1
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I request the following information regarding crimes recorded in Northern Ireland for the financial year 2024/25 (or the most recent 12-month period available):
The number of recorded crimes, broken down by the nationality of the offender(s), focusing on non-UK and Irish nationals.
Question 2
If available, a breakdown of these crimes by major crime categories including violence against the person, theft, drug offences, sex offenses and offender nationality.
Question 3
If nationality data is not recorded or published, confirmation of whether the PSNI collects such data and the reasons it is not publicly available.
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.
For Questions 1 & 2 - To provide accurate data for the information you seek in your request would require a manual trawl through every crime incident in the past 12 months which have been given an outcome indicating a suspect has been identified. Police recorded crime and outcome figures cannot be used to provide information on suspects or offenders as Crime outcomes are counted on the basis of crimes rather than suspects or offenders, there could also be multiple offenders involved in one incident. From April 2024 – March 2025 there were 30,079 recorded crimes which included outcomes of cautions, charge/summons, community resolution notice, penalty notice for disorder and taken into consideration, to determine the offender’s nationality would require a manual check of each incident. Even if it took as little as one minute per incident that would be 501 hours of work. Your request is grossly over the cost limits set out in FOIA.
For Question 3 – Police recorded crime statistics are victim based and offender information is not collated as part of the crime recording process
Police recorded crime and outcomes are published on a regular basis on the PSNI website in the Police recorded crime monthly update and an annual report on crime outcomes. Further details can be found at the link below:
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.
We are unable to offer a refinement