November 20, 2025 | Incident and Crime Statistics , Burglary and Theft
Request Number: FOI/16113
Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Burglary and Theft
Subject: Porch Piracy
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/
For the following time periods:
01/10/2024-30/09/2025
01/10/2023-30/09/2024
01/10/2022-30/09/2023
01/10/2021-30/09/2022
01/10/2020-30/09/2021
Please provide the following information:
Question 1
The number of offences under Home Office Code 42/00 ‘Theft of a mailbag or postal packet" where the keyword ‘parcel" is present within the MO Description / Incident Summary free text field.
Question 2
Of those offences returned for Q1, please advise whether a theft of a parcel was from a porch/doorstep or a shared communal space such as hall if it is a block of flats?
Question 3
If possible, can you share any data that you hold on which postal or parcel carrier delivered the parcels to the doorsteps of the incidents reported for each of the date ranges in Q1.
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.
PSNI can advise that we have no way of identifying whether property was stolen following or as part of a delivery. There is a theft of mail offence, but this doesn’t match the circumstances outlined in this request, e.g. stolen from a doorstep. Therefore all ‘Other theft’ offences would need to be manually examined to determine whether or not the property was stolen in circumstances that match this request. There have been more than 30,000 such offences recorded in the period 1st October 2020 and 31st August 2025 (figures to the end of September 2025 will be available from 30th October 2025).
To manually examine this number of records would take around 3,700 hours and would therefore be grossly over cost. Even if we were to filter on locations of ‘Dwelling’ and ‘Public/Open place’ there were around 19,500 such offences. To manually examine even the lower number of records would take around 2,500 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. Due to system limitation and the reasoning set out above, PSNI are unable to offer any further refinement in this instance.
Please note:
You had asked for a keyword search that is restricted to the '42 Theft of Mail' offence classification. To show exactly what this offence captures we have provided the relevant section from the Home Office Counting Rules, which can be accessed here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/counting-rules-for-recorded-crime
“42 Theft of mail - General Rule: One crime for each incident of theft of mail bags or postal bags.
This classification should be used for all thefts of letters or parcels which are in the process of being delivered by way of a business; that is from the time they leave the originator to the time they reach the recipient address. This includes all carriers such as DHL, Hermes, DPD, UPS and Fed Ex.”
Your request refers to parcels that have been stolen from door steps/porches etc. However, once a parcel has reached the recipient’s address it is no longer in the process of being delivered. Therefore it would not be classified to the Theft of Mail offence.
To assist, please see Table 15 of the spreadsheet which accompanies our end of year Police Recorded Crime Update to 31st March 2025 bulletin, which shows the number of Theft of Mail offences that are recorded each year. The volumes are small – between 9 and 16 for the period that you are interested in. This document is available on the PSNI website:
https://www.psni.police.uk/about-us/our-publications-and-reports/official-statistics/police-recorded-crime-statistics