October 22, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Arrests
Request Number: FOI/15934
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Arrests
Subject: Illegal working
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: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/guide-to-managing-an-foi-request/charging-a-fee-and-cost-limits/
Request
I am writing to request information under the FOI Act 2000. Please provide the following information. I am happy to receive it in the form of a spreadsheet or several spreadsheets. All my questions refer to the crime of working illegally (i.e. the worker does not have the right to work in the UK), and not to the crime of employing an illegal worker. I am aware that information about employers fined for hiring illegal workers is already published.
Question 1
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many right to work checks have been carried out by police officers (i.e. number of peoples whose immigration status was checked by police)?
Question 2
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many of those right to work checks were conducted on people working as delivery riders for Deliveroo/UberEats/?
Question 3
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many people were arrested for working illegally?
Question 4
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many of those arrested for working illegally were asylum seekers?
Question 5
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many of those arrested for working illegally were working as delivery riders for Deliveroo/UberEats/JustEat?
Question 6
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many people have been charged with working illegally?
Question 7
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many possible hate crimes against asylum seekers have been recorded? If you do not have a figure on this specifically, please instead provide a combined figure for violent crimes recorded where the victim was an asylum seeker.
Question 8
For every month since the beginning of 2025, how many violent crimes against people working as delivery riders have been recorded?
If you do not have data on questions 7 and 8, or collating it would exceed costs, please provide a response to questions 1-6.
Clarification Received
I would like to clarify that questions 1 and 2 relate to right to work checks carried out on people who were not already under arrest.
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 some of the information you seek in your request may be held on the PSNI database, it is not held in a retrievable format. Questions 1 and 2 are over cost by reasoning that every officer would have to check their notebooks to establish if their right to work check/immigration status was checked by police.
For Questions 3 to 6 – All answers would be zero, as it is the responsibility of The Home Office Immigration Enforcement to enforce the laws around 'Illegal working'. Occasionally the PSNI will accompany external agencies such as Immigration to protect them while making enquires. Please contact The Home Office Immigration Enforcement at the following link - Immigration Enforcement - GOV.UK
For Question 7 - PSNI do not hold information on an individual’s asylum status. There have been around 1,100 crimes with a hate motivation between January and June 2025. If each of these are to be manually examined then the request will be over cost - 1,100 records at 10 minutes per record would take around 180 hours.
For Question 8 - There is no specific offence of violent crime against a delivery rider, therefore we would need to manually examine all recorded violence against the person offences to see whether the victim was working as a delivery rider at the time of the offence. As there were around 27,000 violence against the person offences between January and August 2025, this would take around 3,000 hours and would therefore be over cost. 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.
If we complete a search from the 1st of the year until this date and use just the closing codes of assault and robbery (possible refinement), this still returns 988 occurrences, which taking 5 minutes for each as a maximum would take 84 hours. Therefore we are unable to offer any refinement.
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.