August 20, 2025 | Operational Policing, Investigations and Events , Investigations and Operations
Request Number: FOI/15279
Category: Crime/Incident Statistics - Arrests/Detainees/Outcomes
Subject: Domestic Abuse Flagged Crime Investigations and Suspect Recorded Occupation
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/
I am writing under the Freedom of Information act to request data held on crimes investigated by your force which were flagged as Domestic Abuse (DA) related, their recorded outcome, and if a named suspect's occupation is ‘police officer' or related role*, from 1 January 2021 to 30 April 2025. Specifically, I request the following information, broken down by month and outcome. Please break down outcomes by HOCR type i.e. Type 1 Charged/Summonsed, Type 2 Youth Caution, etc.
N.b. this request refers to crime investigations, not professional standards/misconduct.
If for whatever reason your systems do not allow the retrieval of this data for the whole period, or doing so would exceed cost limitations, please limit your response to a reasonable time frame by starting with a more recent month.
If summarising totals by month is considered too detailed due to small numbers, please break down by year or just the overall total before considering suppressing figures.
Please send the response in an Excel spreadsheet.
* My understanding is that occupation recording is not standardised, therefore I request that you include job titles like ‘police officer' / ‘serving officer' / ‘special constable'/ specific job titles if listed i.e. ‘police constable' or ‘police sergeant' – but do not include civilian titles like ‘police staff' or PCSO. I also understand that occupation may not always be recorded (see Q3).
Request 1
All recorded crime investigations flagged as DA, total broken down by month and outcome type, 2021 to end of April 2025. Grouped by date investigation was opened.
| Month | Outcome type 1 | Outcome type 2 | ...etc | Ongoing/live | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Request 2
Similarly, but for only those investigations where a named suspect has a recorded occupation of police officer* (see definition above), all recorded crime investigations flagged as DA, total broken down
by month and outcome type, 2021 to end of April 2025. Grouped by date investigation was opened.
| Month | Outcome type 1 | Outcome type 2 | ...etc | Ongoing/live | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Request 3
If possible and not exceeding cost limitations please also indicate, of the total number of investigations in Q1, …
A. The number which have at least one named suspect.
B. The proportion of linked suspects who have any occupation recorded.
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.
With regards to Request 2, PSNI can advise while this information is held electronically, it is not held in a retrievable manner. In order to retrieve this information, we would need to perform a keyword search to identify which cases relate to Domestic Abuse, after which a manual trawl would need to be conducted of each individual case to ensure they meet your criteria and then extract the relevant information. Initial searches reveal approximately 400 cases that would need examined, at a conservative 5 minutes per case this would amount to 33 hours, exceeding the legislative timeframe of 18 hours.
Please note 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.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/freedom-of-information-and-environmental-information-regulations/recognising-a-request-made-under-the-freedom-of-information-act-section-8/
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.
With regards to Request 1, we can advise that we can provide a breakdown of all recorded domestic abuse offences by the currently assigned outcome, for the period 1st January 2021 to 31st March 2025. Figures up to the end of April 2025 will be available once our next domestic abuse bulletin is published on the 28th August 2025.
With Regards to Request 2, we would be able to provide figures for the year 2025 only.
Unfortunately we are unable to offer any further refinement for Request 3.
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.