Parcel Theft/Burglaries around Christmas

Request Number: FOI/16143

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Burglary and Theft

Subject: Parcel Theft/Burglaries around Christmas

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/

Question 1
The total number of recorded burglaries that occurred on the following dates for each year 2020–2025 (inclusive):
a) 24th of December,
b) 25th of December,
c) 26th of December,
d) 31st of December
e) 1st of January

For burglaries during the festive period, if held, indicate whether a suspect was charged for each offence, or if the case remained unsolved and no suspect was identified. If charge outcome data is not readily available, please still provide the number of burglaries by date.

Question 2
The total number of recorded parcel thefts between 1 January 2020 and 29 October 2025, broken down by month and year.

If ‘doorstep parcel thefts" are not recorded as a specific crime category, please provide the nearest available equivalent (e.g. theft from a dwelling, theft from doorstep, or similar).

If no such category exists, please identify relevant incidents by conducting a keyword search of crime reports or incident logs using terms such as ‘parcel", ‘package", ‘delivery", or ‘doorstep", and provide the number of records identified.

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.

Question 2 brings the request in full over cost.

Whilst the information is held electronically, there is no specific offence of stealing a package from a doorstep. Therefore this request is a keyword search which would require the manual examination of all recorded ‘Other Theft offences’. Between January 2020 and September 2025 there were around 36,000 such offences.  To manually examine this many records would take around 4500 hours and would therefore be over cost.

Please note: Extracting the data from our systems via a ‘keyword search’ is considered to be extremely unreliable, due to the need to search through unstructured data. This means that PSNI cannot automatically determine the context of the term found in the search result, and further assessment would be required. For unstructured data fields, we also cannot rely on the data having been entered in such a way as to identify those records that are relevant. Spelling mistakes, abbreviations and aliases can all affect the reliability of a keyword search. Additionally, we do not have the ability to search for keywords within external documents stored in Niche, so the scope with which we can do a keyword search is limited.

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.

Question 1 - A response can be provided

Question 2 - Unfortunately we are unable to provide refinement for this question.

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.