Cyber Crime Mobile Forensic Lab(s)

Request Number: FOI/14917

Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Forensics

Subject: Cyber Crime Mobile Forensic Lab(s)

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 Details
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am requesting the following information regarding the Police Service of Northern Irelands (PSNI) Cyber Crime mobile forensic lab(s) as mentioned in the BBC news article:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-northern-ireland-48711019

Request 1
Could you please provide the overall cost for the first mobile forensic lab acquired by the PSNI?

Request 2
For the first mobile forensic lab, what has been the yearly mileage recorded from its time of purchase up to May 2025? Please provide this information on a yearly basis.

Request 3
For the first mobile forensic lab, how many times has it been deployed on a yearly basis from its time of purchase up to May 2025?

Request 4
Has the PSNI purchased any additional mobile forensic labs since the acquisition of the first one?

Request 5
If the answer to question 4 is yes, for each subsequent mobile forensic lab purchased, what has been the yearly mileage recorded from its time of purchase up to May 2025? Please provide this information on a yearly basis for each additional lab.

Request 6
If the answer to question 4 is yes, for each subsequent mobile forensic lab purchased, how many times has it been deployed on a yearly basis from its time of purchase up to May 2025? Please provide this information on a yearly basis for each additional lab.

Request 7
Have the mobile lab(s) acquired by the PSNI remained within Northern Ireland since their respective purchases?

Request 8
If the answer to question 7 is no, for each instance where a mobile lab was outside of Northern Ireland, please provide the name of the Police Force or other entity that had possession of the mobile lab and the dates during which they had possession.

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.

Whilst the information you seek is held by the PSNI, some information is not held in a format that would allow its retrieval without manual intervention. PSNI is not saying it does not hold the data that you request, however to extract the data you have sought in Requests 3 and 6 would require a manual trawl of PSNI’s records – hence putting the request grossly over the 18 hour cost limit set out under the FOIA.

The information sought in Requests 3 and 6 is not held centrally. To retrieve the data you seek would require a manual trawl of our case management system to locate then review all forms requesting onsite assistance for this time period. After a deployment is authorised, there is no set vehicle that is used and it is up to the officer which of the two vans they use. Thus we would have to canvas the officers with regards to dates deployed and which van they used. It is possible that the officers may not have made a note of the vans used, so dates would have to be cross referenced with locate data.

Consequently for PSNI to retrieve this information would be over the cost limits. Under Section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, if any part of the request exceeds the cost threshold then the whole request will be excess costs and there is no obligation to answer any part of the request.

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 may be able to provide a response to the following within the appropriate limit:

• Requests 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 and 8.
   

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.