Motor Vehicle Thefts Data

Request Number: FOI/13641

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Theft

Subject: Motor Vehicle Thefts Data
 

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 Details
Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I am writing to formally request the following information regarding motor vehicle thefts within the Police Service of Northern Ireland for the period from 01/01/2020 to 31/12/2024:

Definition of Request:
For the purposes of this request, "motor vehicle theft” refers to the offense of taking a motor vehicle without consent as defined under Section 12 of the Theft Act 1968. Whilst I understand some Police Force Areas record theft of motor vehicles differently (e.g. Theft of Motor Vehicle, Aggravated Vehicle Taking), any data matching the concept of motor vehicle theft is sufficient.

Request 1
Incident Number: A unique numeric identifier for each incident (this does not need to correspond with your internal system).

Request 2
Date and Time: The date and time of the incident occurrence or, if unavailable, the date and time of the report. If time data is not recorded, please provide the date only.

Request 3
Location: The most granular location data available (or that you are allowed to provide) for each incident, preferably in latitude and longitude coordinates. If latitude/longitude cannot be provided, please return the next most granular
location data available.

Request 4
Manufacturer: The vehicles manufacturer. If this is not a distinct column in your records, please provide the free text field where a vehicle's manufacturer is mentioned.

Request 5
Model: The vehicles model. If this is not a distinct column in your records, please provide the free text field where a vehicle's model is mentioned.

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. 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.

The information you seek is not held centrally and would require a manual trawl through records to answer this request. The vehicle table on NICHE includes an involvement classification field where one of the options is ‘stolen’. However, this ‘stolen’ relates to the vehicle, and not to the offence, i.e. ‘stolen’ doesn’t necessarily mean the vehicle was stolen as part of the linked offence; it could also mean that a vehicle which was previously stolen was used in the execution of a subsequent offence e.g. a vehicle is stolen from a construction site, and then subsequently used as part of an ATM theft. This vehicle would appear in the vehicle table twice, both times as ‘stolen’ but it has only been stolen once.

Around a quarter of all vehicles classified as ‘stolen’ in the vehicle table do not link to a crime record, or they link to an occurrence where an offence other than either ‘48 Theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle’ or ‘37.2 Aggravated vehicle taking’ has been recorded. Additionally, around a third of recorded ‘48 Theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle’ and ‘37.2 Aggravated vehicle taking’ offences do not have a linked vehicle in the vehicle table.

For the PSNI to identify relevant information for all stolen vehicles in the period 1st January 2020 to 31st December 2024, we would need to manually examine all ‘48 Theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle’ and ‘37.2 Aggravated vehicle taking’.  As there were around 6,200 ‘48’ and ‘37.2’ offences between 1st January 2020 to 31st December 2024, this would be over grossly cost as it would take in excess of 1000 hours to review.

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. 

Unfortunately, due to the way the data that you seek is held, we are unable to provide a refinement for this request.

By way of advice, the PSNI have provided information to the Police.UK crime map. The crime map provides street level information on crime and was developed in consultation with the Information Commissioner’s Office. This uses snap points so that the exact location of a crime is not provided, and information is displayed by month – not date and time.  There is a category called ‘Vehicle Crime’ which will also cover offences of vehicle tampering and theft from a vehicle.

You can find this information on the Police.UK website:

https://data.police.uk/

It should be noted that following the data breach in 2023, PSNI provision of data was suspended and has not yet resumed.

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.