December 16, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Arrests
Request Number: FOI/16142
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Arrests
Subject: Palestine Action
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 Details
Please can you give this information from 2020 to date. However, if that would lead to the request being out of scope, please do as much as you can from 2025 working backwards.
For questions 2 and 3, please can you break down how many people have been arrested or charged.
Request 1
The number of incidents that your police force has attended that relate to, or were suspected to relate to, the organisation Palestine Action
Request 2
The number of arrests and charges in relation to Palestine Action, this is for prior to the proscription in July 2025.
Request 3
The number of arrests that your police force has made relating to the proscription of Palestine Action (so since summer 2025)
Request 4
The number of charges that your police force has made relating to the proscription of Palestine Action (so since summer 2025)
Request 5
Please can you specify how many people, if any, have been arrested and / or charged with being a member of Palestine Action?
Request 6
Since the proscription of Palestine Action, how many police officers have been deployed to police protests about the proscription?
Request 7
Do you have any reports or estimates of the costs of policing the protests against Palestine Actions proscription?
Request 8
How many people have the force referred to Prevent in relation to Palestine Action?
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 Request 1 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.
To retrieve the data for incidents that the PSNI have attended, which are in relation to Palestine Action, would require a manual trawl of all incident records regarding protests, parades, pre-planned events and antisocial behaviour to establish if there was a Palestine Action element. It has been estimated that it could take at a minimum 5 minutes per record to review each record.
For one district alone, there are several thousand records that would require review. Thus to retrieve the data you seek for Request 1 would grossly exceed the 18 hour cost limit.
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 Request 1 under the appropriate limit.
We may be able to provide a response to the remainder of your requests, however, 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.
Working up to the Cost Limit
The PSNI is not obliged to search for, or compile some of the requested information before refusing a request that we estimate will exceed the appropriate limit. The ICO advised that we are not obliged to search up to the appropriate limit simply because the applicant has asked. As set out in their guidance below, a request framed by the cost limit is not a valid request.