Incidents at Asylum / Accommodation Sites

Request Number: FOI/16679

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Hate Crime and Equality

Subject: Incidents at Asylum / Accommodation Sites

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
For the period 1 January 2025 to 31 December 2025, please provide the total number of recorded police incidents at asylum accommodation sites
Excluding incidents primarily attributed to protests, demonstrations, or public-order events involving non-residents. This should be based only on existing markers, such as:
•incident type classifications
•subject/offender descriptors
•location-based coding
•flags already used internally
•No manual review of narratives is requested.

Request 2
Where held in an existing reportable format, please provide an aggregate breakdown of the incidents above by high-level category, for example:
a) Violence against the person
b) Sexual offences
c) Criminal damage
d) Public order (non-protest related)
e) Weapons offences
f) Drug offences
g) Safeguarding / welfare
h) Other notifiable offences

Request 3
For the same 2025 period and same non-protest scope, please provide:
a) Total number of arrests arising from these incidents
b) Total number of cases submitted to the CPS

Request 4
Please confirm whether your force records or flags whether an incident at asylum accommodation is:
a) resident-related; or
b) protest/demonstration-related
Whether such a distinction is:
c) held in a structured field
d) searchable without manual review and
e) available for reporting purposes.
f) If no such distinction exists, please confirm this explicitly.

This request concerns migrant/resident-related incidents only, using data already held. 

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 is held electronically by the PSNI, it is not held in a format that would allow its retrieval without manual intervention. To extract the data you have sought in your request would require a manual trawl of PSNI’s records – hence putting the request grossly over the 18 hour cost limit set out under the FOIA.

PSNI can advise that while we do hold this information electronically, it is not held in an easily retrievable manner. Unfortunately, 'Asylum accommodation' is not a searchable criteria that would be recorded, so in order to obtain the requested information, we would need to conduct a manual trawl of each individual custody record for the year requested.  There are 703,420 occurrences for the dates you have requested, approx. 5 minutes for each occurrence, this unfortunately would take us well over the 18 hour timeframe provided by legislation.

The main difficulty with providing an answer for this request, is that we would first need to research each asylum accommodation in Northern Ireland, this would take several hours for accuracy. Once completed, we would need to conduct a manual trawl through each incident recorded on Niche linked to that accommodation - again, this would take multiple hours of research to not only find each incident but each nominal linked. Another manual trawl would then need to be actioned to locate the information requested, taking hours. The biggest issue would be providing accuracy from this report as we would need to spend many hours determining if each incident is linked to an asylum accommodation.

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.  Unfortunately we cannot offer a refinement for your request.