Dumping of Farm Animals

Request Number: FOI/15999

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Wildlife and Animal Welfare

Subject: Dumping of Farm Animals

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(2) 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(2) 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/

Question 1
Can you provide the number of investigations initiated by PSNI relating to the illegal dumping of farm animal carcasses in Mid-Ulster between January 1st 2023 and October 1st 2025?

Question 2
Can you provide the number and type of enforcement actions taken (e.g. cautions, fines, referrals to other agencies) during the period January 1st 2023 until 1st October 2025?

Question 3
Can you provide the number of prosecutions brought forward and the number of successful prosecutions during this period January 1st 2023 and October 1st 2025?

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(2) 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.

Question 1 brings the request in full over cost. Questions 2 and 3 rely on the information in Question 1 being held and retrieved -  therefore they cannot be answered.

The requested information is not formally recorded by PSNI. In order to establish whether or not this information is held, every individual call for service for Mid Ulster for the date range requested would need to be manually examined in order to establish its relevance to the request as unfortunately there is no closing code or option on NICHE that relates specifically to the illegal dumping of farm animal carcasses.

For 1st January 2023 - 1st October 2025, there were around 93,000 calls relevant to the Mid Ulster district. Using an estimate of 15 minutes per call, it would take approximately 23,250 hours in order to establish whether or not the information is held, bringing the request in full over cost.

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
In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit and, unfortunately, we are unable to provide refinement for this request.

The requested information would be the remit of Northern Ireland Environmental Agency (NIEA) via The Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs (DAERA). You can find more information on making requests to the department at the following link: Access to information | Department of Agriculture, Environment and Rural Affairs.