May 15, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Wildlife and Animal Welfare
Request Number: FOI/14490
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Wildlife
Subject: Foraging or picking of plants
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) I 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. We have explained to you below that when PSNI estimates whether the appropriate limit is likely to be exceeded, it can include the costs of complying with two or more requests if certain conditions are met. In this case those conditions are met and complying with all of your requests would in our estimation exceed that appropriate limit set out in Regulation. We have explained this further below but also we 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:
You requested the following information from PSNI:
Request
I would like to submit a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) regarding foraging or picking of plants. Please provide the relevant information for the period between 1 April 2022 and the most recent date for which data is available. Please could you provide the following:
Request 1 A – E
The number of reports made to your force about foraging or picking of plants. Please could you provide the following breakdown:
a) A yearly breakdown of the number of reports made about foraging or picking of plants.
b) The approximate location (for example name of the park or road) at which the foraging or picking of plants allegedly took place.
c) Whether the report of foraging or picking of plants led to a charge.
d) The names of the offences under which these charges were made.
e) The number of these charges which proceeded to conviction.
If you need to carry out a key terms search to locate these records, please include the terms “foraged”, “foraging”, “wild food”, “forager”, “wild ingredients”. If you would document these cases in another way, please include these results as per the spirit of my request.
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.
PSNI hold the data electronically, however it is not held in a retrievable via automated search functions and would require a manual integration of the records due to how the data is stored and structured e.g. filters, scripts etc. In order to comply with this request, all calls to service regarding animals and wildlife would need to be individually examined. There is specific recording code that would provide this information and for example, for 3 years alone (2022-2024 inclusive), 15,706 calls to service would need to be examined across multiple databases. At approximately 15 minutes per call to service, this would take an estimated 3,926 hours.
It should be further noted that Wildlife and animal welfare offences are not recordable through the home office and therefore any statistics and would involve a manual trawl through all incidents to capture and review to ensure they are relevant to the request.
To further assist a key word search was undertaken using the following terms: "foraged”, "foraging”, "wild food”, "forager”, "forage” "wild ingredients”, "picking fruit”, "picking fruit”, "picking plants”, and whilst this provided no results, for information, keyword searches are an unreliable method of collecting data from the Niche recording database because they rely on searching through unstructured data. This means that you cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result and a manual review is almost always be required to decide if the result meets the criteria of the FOI request and retrieval will often exceed the appropriate cost limit.
For unstructured data fields we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search. In addition, we do not have the ability to search for keywords within external documents stored in the databases, so the scope with which we can do a keyword search is limited.
There is no explicit link between offences and the fields checked for the keywords so each occurrence would again need to be manually reviewed to confirm if they are related to the information requested.
The request exceeds the 18 hour cost limit as set by the Secretary of State.
Unfortunately, on this occasion as a manual trawl of records would be required for retrieval of any relevant information, it is not possible to offer any refinement to assist your request.
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.