October 06, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Anti-social Behaviour
Request Number: FOI/15695
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics – Antisocial Behaviour
Subject: Harassment, Intimidation and Antisocial Behaviour
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:
Request 1
Copies of PSNI policies, service instructions or operational guidance relating to harassment, stalking, intimidation, neighbour disputes, and antisocial behaviour.
Request 2
Records of training materials or guidance provided to officers on recognising harassment and intimidation in housing/community contexts.
Request 3
Annual data on the number of harassment, intimidation, or antisocial behaviour reports received by PSNI (2020–2025), broken down by:
• Gender of victim
• Whether in social housing, private rental, or owner-occupied housing
• Outcomes (no crime, crime recorded, prosecution, NFA)
Request 4
Number of cases where women reporting harassment or intimidation by neighbours were themselves arrested, investigated, or prosecuted for related offences (2020–2025).
Request 5
Any internal reviews, audits, or evaluations conducted into PSNI’s handling of harassment/intimidation cases in social housing settings.
Request 6
What steps has PSNI taken since 2020 to ensure harassment, intimidation and stalking complaints are recognised as crimes rather than dismissed as “neighbour disputes”?
Request 7
How does PSNI ensure women reporting intimidation are not themselves criminalised, and what safeguards exist to prevent this?
Request 8
What training is currently given to frontline officers on harassment, stalking, and intimidation, and how is effectiveness measured?
Request 9
How many cases of harassment/intimidation in housing have led to successful interventions or prosecutions since 2020?
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 in your request is held on PSNI database, it is not held centrally or in a retrievable format. For Request 3, Request 4 and Request 9 from the period of January 2020 - July 2025 there we over 2,100 recorded offences of ‘intimidation – residence/occupation’ to determine which of these offences involved housing would require a manual examination of each record. At 10 minutes per record this would take around 350 hours. To include all harassment offences would also require each record to be manually examined to determine whether they are related to housing. This would add around 38,000 records to be checked. Your request is grossly over the cost limits set out in FOIA.
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 can answer Requests, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8.