January 21, 2026 | Operational Policing, Investigations and Events , Investigations and Operations
Request Number: FOI/16565
Category: Operational policing, Investigations and Events - Investigations and Operations
Subject: Murders committed in NI
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
Could the PSNI provide me a list of all murders committed in Northern Ireland since April 10th, 1998 to date?
Request 2
Could this list include the exact date of the offence, name of victim and location of offence.
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 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.
Searches for specific offences on our system return results where the searched offence was the highest level offence a suspect was arrested for. The date for each murder as held by PSNI is the report date (as per the Home Office Counting Rules) and, in certain circumstances, this may be more recent than the date the murder was committed. Therefore each record would need checked to ensure that any murders committed before April 10th 1998 but recorded after April 10th 1998 are excluded from any response.
This would include a manual trawl of both paper and electronic records. All records prior to April 2007 are held in paper format and any information would need to be manually extracted and compiled, where it is available.
Between April 1998 and March 2007, we have identified 344 murder offences, based on the report date alone. There have been 327 murder offences recorded, based on report date alone, between 2007/08 and 2024/25 and these will also require manual examination to retrieve the data sought in your request.
We have carried out a dip sample of both paper and electronic records, and to recover and review all relevant documents (in excess of 650), to retrieve the data you seek has been estimated to take approximately 1026 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.
Unfortunately, due the way in which we hold this information, we are unable to suggest a refinement that would bring this request under the appropriate limit.
However, we can advise PSNI publishes the number of murders recorded, based on the report date, in each financial year since 1998/99. We also publish the number of homicides (murder, manslaughter, infanticide and corporate manslaughter) recorded by financial year by policing district and also by age/gender. You can find these statistics by following the link below to the ‘Police Recorded Crime monthly update’ and ‘Police Recorded Crime Annual Trends’:
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.