Sex Offenders

Request Number: FOI-2025-13668

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Sexual Offences

Subject: Sex Offenders
 

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:
https://ico.org.uk/media/for-organisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_limit.pdf

Request 1 
How many convicted registered sex offenders are of British nationality?

Request 2

How many registered sex offenders are of non-British nationality?

Request 3

How many registered sex offenders in each county according to racial background?

Answers
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.

As of February 2025 there are a total of 2076 convicted registered sexual offenders presently managed within the Northern Ireland Jurisdiction. A total of 597 are recorded as having ‘British’ nationality and a total of 420 have no recorded nationality. In order to confirm the nationality of the 420, to establish if nationality is ‘British’ or not, which may include further systems checks on other databases which is a manual trawl. A conservative estimate of 1 minute per each database would be necessary which equates to approximately 14 hours of research to answer Request 1 alone in addition to the initial 2 hours and 50 minutes already spent.

There are presently 1059 nominals showing on PSNI’s database as having a nationality other than ‘British’ / non-British. 

If this request was not over cost ,clarity would also have been required concerning does the request wish ‘British’ nationality data to incorporate also collectively ‘Northern Irish’, ‘Scottish’, ‘English’ and ‘Welsh’, which are other nationality categorisations within our databases? This information would be necessary, and would add a further 30 minutes of research. However, if the request considers the separate nationality categorisations of ‘Northern Irish’, ‘Scottish’, ‘English’ and ‘Welsh’ to also mean ‘British’, further research would be necessary, amounting to additional undetermined amount of  time to attempt to answer Request 2.

Unfortunately the information needed to answer request 3 there are 38 ethnic codes available for ethnicity designation on our database.  Therefore 38 separate searches of the current 2076 registered sexual offenders, each completed 6 times (one for each Northern Ireland county), thereby 228 searches, would be necessary in order to establish the county within which each sexual offender of each ethnic code resides. Further, additional database manual trawls would also be required to establish contemporary address / county information. A conservative estimate of 1 minute per 228 search would equate to nearly 4 hours in total. However, allocating a further estimated 2 minutes to search additional databases, for the 2076 records, would equate to approximately 69 hours. 

Therefore based on the rationale outlined above, to answer your requests would be significantly over cost.
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 on this occasion we are unable to provide any refinement for your request.
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.