Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation Offences

Request Number: FOI/15694

Category: Organisational Information & Performance - Police Properties and Estate

Subject: Group-based Child Sexual Exploitation Offences

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/

Request 1
The number of group-based child sexual exploitation offences recorded by the force for each of the past three calendar years (Or if this data has not been recorded, the number of child sexual abuse offences, flagged as child sexual exploitation, for each of the past three calendar years)

Request 2
The total number of alleged victims involved in these offences for each of the past three calendar years.

Request 3
The number of requests the force has made to Snapchat (Snap Inc) for account data/records, as part of investigations into group-based child sexual exploitation investigations (or CSA investigations flagged as CSE) for each of the past three calendar years.

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 is held electronically, it is not retrievable via automated processes.

A manual examination of all incidents where the victim is a child and the offence is sexual in nature would be required in order to establish if: a) it involved group based offending; b) the relevant application was made for data sharing with any social media platform and; c) whether or not the application relates specifically to Snapchat.

For the financial year 2023/24, there were 2,242 sexual offences recorded where the victim was under the age of 18 at the time the offence was committed. Using a conservative estimate of 20 minutes per incident to review the case file and occurrence log, this would take approximately 747 hours, 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 due to the way in which it is stored.