July 17, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Knife Crime
Request Number: FOI/14669
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Knife Crime
Subject: Knife Crime Schools
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 1A
How many times have you responded to a malicious threat or intruder at a school where they have had to do a full lockdown in the years (from January-January): 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.
Request 1B
Can you give a breakdown to the nature of the incident in reference to question 1a
Request 2A
How many people aged 0 to 16-years-old have been found in possession of a knife or bladed articles in school and have been arrested for the following years (from January-January): 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.
Request 2B
Can you give a break down by age and sex in reference to question 2a
Request 3A
How many people aged 0 to 16-years-old have been charged for possession of a knife or bladed article at a school for the following years (from January-January): 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.
Request 3B
Can you give a break down by age and sex in reference to question 3a
Request 4A
How many violent assaults have you attended in schools for the following years (from January-January): 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.
Request 4B
Can you give a break down by age and sex in reference to question 4a
Clarification Sought
In relation to Q4a 'How many violent assaults have you attended in schools for the following years(from January-January): 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025.'
Our statistics branch do not hold attendance information but can provide the number of police recorded crime assault offences under the Violence against the Person classification where the location was a school. Would this be acceptable?
Clarification Received
Yes I can accept the number of police recorded crime assault offences under the Violence against the Person classification where the location was a school.
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 in Requests 2 and 3 are held electronically by the PSNI, it is not held in a format that would allow its retrieval without manual intervention. PSNI is not saying it does not hold the data that you request, however 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.
Persons may be arrested for or charged with weapons offences that do not indicate that it specifically occurred within a school e.g. Possessing Article With Blade Or Point in a Public Place. Every record for these types of offences, between 2019 and 2025, would need to be manually examined to determine if the offence happened within a school. It has been estimated to manually review each of these records, to determine the location, would take in excess of 18 hours.
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 may be able to provide the following within the appropriate limit:
- A response to Request 1A
- The number of persons arrested and processed through police custody for the offence of ‘Possessing Article with Blade or Point on School Premises’ only.
- The number of persons arrested and processed through police custody and subsequently charged for the offence of ‘Possessing Article with Blade or Point on School Premises’ only.
- The number of police recorded crime assault offences where the MO location is ‘Education – school or college’ from 1 January 2019 to 31 May 2025.
- We may be able to provide a breakdown by age and gender, for 2, 3 and 4 above, but this may be subject to exemption.
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.