April 16, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Calls for Service (999/101/Response Times)
Request Number: FOI-2025-14133
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics
Subject: Incidents/Calls for Service at Abortion Services locations
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/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf
Request 1
Please provide the following information:
Details of any incidents and/or calls for service related to anti-abortion protestors/demonstrators, including reports made by the public, between the dates 01/04/2020 to 28/09/2023 (inclusive) at hospitals and clinics providing abortion services at the following locations;
Causeway Hospital
4 Newbridge Road
Coleraine
BT52 1HS
Altnagelvin Area Hospital
Glenshane Road
Londonderry
BT47 6SB
Craigavon Area Hospital
68 Lurgan Road
Portadown
BT63 5QQ
Daisy Hill Hospital
5 Hospital Road
Newry
BT35 8DR
Bradbury Wellbeing and Treatment Centre
1-17 Lisburn Road
Belfast
BT9 7AA
Rose Clinic
Sexual and Reproductive Health Clinic
College Street
Belfast
BT1
Lagan Valley Hospital
39 Hillsborough Road
Lisburn
BT28 1JP
Ulster Hospital
Upper Newtownards Road
Dundonald
BT16 1RH
Please include the date of incident, nature of incident, location of incident, and action taken by PSNI for all incidents and/or calls for service.
Request 2 Please provide the following information:
Details of any incidents and/or calls for service related to anti-abortion protestors/demonstrators, including reports made by the public, between the dates 29/09/2023 to 28/02/2025 (inclusive) within Safe Access Zones at hospitals and clinics providing abortion services at the following locations;
Causeway Hospital
4 Newbridge Road
Coleraine
BT52 1HS
Altnagelvin Area Hospital
Glenshane Road
Londonderry
BT47 6SB
Craigavon Area Hospital
68 Lurgan Road
Portadown
BT63 5QQ
Daisy Hill Hospital
5 Hospital Road
Newry
BT35 8DR
Bradbury Wellbeing and Treatment Centre
1-17 Lisburn Road
Belfast
BT9 7AA
Rose Clinic
Sexual and Reproductive Health Clinic
College Street
Belfast
BT1
Lagan Valley Hospital
39 Hillsborough Road
Lisburn
BT28 1JP
Ulster Hospital
Upper Newtownards Road
Dundonald
BT16 1RH
Please include the date of incident, nature of incident, location of incident, and action taken by PSNI for all incidents and/or calls for service.
Answers 1 – 2
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. This information is not held in a retrievable format that provides the information without manual intervention, and a comprehensive search would need to be conducted to retrieve this information.
For Craigavon Area Hospital alone there were potentially 160 protests. Allowing a very conservative estimate of 10 minutes to review each protest, it would take 26 hours to go through each and every one just for Craigavon Area Hospital alone.
The information is not readily available and a manual trawl through 2 different databases would be required to find the information. One of these databases would need to be searched on a month by month basis search criteria .This would be followed by opening each individual serial to collate details of what occurred at each protest, number of participants, officers etc.
The other database would then need to be searched and depending on what category they were created and closed under could mean potentially trawling through hundreds of incidents close to Craigavon Area Hospital or Daisy Hill. The search would also have to incorporate ‘within the vicinity of’ these locations which could result in hundreds of serials.
This request would be grossly over cost just for Craigavon Area Hospital, not taking into account the other hospitals.
Armagh, Banbridge and Craigavon, Causeway Coast and Glens, and Newry, Mourne and Down have also advised to answer these questions would also be grossly over cost for their respective districts.
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, however at this time 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.