October 22, 2025 | Roads Policing and Safety Cameras , Traffic Offences
Request Number: FOI/15845
Category: Roads Policing and Safety Cameras - Traffic Offences
Subject: Illegally Modified E-bike
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:
Question 1
Please may I request information relating to illegally modified battery-powered pedal cycles (ebikes):
Can you please provide details of the number of illegally modified ebikes seized by police over the last three years (stats for 2023, 2024 and 2025 so far?)
Question 2
Can you please identify the highest speed (in mph) the force has ever recorded for a person riding an illegally modified ebike?
Question 3
Can you please provide details of where/when (on which road) the highest speed was recorded?
Question 4
The age of the rider who recorded the highest speed?
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.
For Q1, There is no specific classification code for e-bikes on PSNI database and the information you seek in your request is not recorded in a retrievable format. A manual intervention would be required through all records for bikes seized by PSNI in 2023, 2024 and 2025 to date. Each one would need to be checked to determine the type of bike seized. Reports about e-bikes speeding are likely to be captured under wider offences such as traffic offences. A speed detection is not recorded by vehicle type. From 6th April 2024 – 5th April 2025 there were 4,513 speed detections in Northern Ireland, each record would need to be checked to determine the type of vehicle that was used and the details of the driver. Even if it took as little as one minute to check each record that would be approximately 75 hours. Once it was established that an e-bike was present in an incident to then answer Q2, Q3 and Q4 would also require a manual trawl through each of those incidents to determine the rider’s age, location of offence and speed recorded. 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 are unable to offer a refinement.