Justice Act Anonymity

Request Number: FOI/16716

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Sexual Offences

Subject: Justice Act Anonymity

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 (PSNI) 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(2) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and this will be further explained below. PSNI have followed the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) 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(2) 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
I wish to request details in relation to the outworkings of the Justice (Sexual Offences and Trafficking Victims) Act (Northern Ireland) 2022.
Please disclose the following for the period since the Act came into effect in September 2023:

Request 1
The number of deceased victims of sexual crime who the PSNI has been unable to name publicly because of this law.

Request 2
The number of deceased victims who the PSNI has named publicly, but chose not to disclose that they were victims of sexual crime because of this law.

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.

In order to locate this information (if relating to a court matter), it would need to be established when the victim died and when judicial proceedings began. This would require the death to have been reported to PSNI, as well as information being held as to the commencement of court proceedings. Both sections of these may not be recorded on police systems in every occurrence.

Therefore, in order to establish whether or not the information is even held, would require all occurrences relating to sexual offences, whereby it is recorded that a case file has been shared with the Public Prosecution Service (for context: 4,244 sexual offences for 2024/25 period alone) to be manually reviewed. Using a conservative estimate of 5 minutes per offence, this would take approximately 353 hours for 2024/25 alone, bringing the request in full over cost.

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
In compliance with Section 16 of the Act, we have considered how your request may be refined to bring it under the appropriate limit. Unfortunately, due to the search methods required, we are unable to provide refinement for this request.

The below information on the Justice Act 2022 and Sexual Offences Act 1992, may be of interest.

In Northern Ireland, the lifelong anonymity of sexual offence complainants, including after their death, is provided by the Sexual Offences Act 1992. This means that the name of a deceased victim of a sexual offence cannot be released publicly if doing so would identify them as a complainant.

The 2022 Justice Act did not introduce or extend that anonymity, but it reinforces a victim-centred approach and reduces unnecessary public exposure during criminal proceedings.

As a result, the PSNI does not routinely release the names of deceased victims in sexual offence cases, not because they are unknown, but because the law restricts publication.

Any decision to release identifying information would be considered only where lawful and appropriate, for example where anonymity does not apply or where disclosure would not identify the individual as a sexual offence complainant.