Stolen phones that have been seized

Request Number: FOI/14519

Category: Incident and Crime Statistics - Theft

Subject: Stolen phones that have been seized

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

This is a request for information about the number of stolen mobile phones that have been recovered by police. I understand that it is impossible to reunite many with their owners because many devices aren't registered stolen or the IMEI numbers are unknown by their owner. 

Request 1
How many stolen or suspected stolen mobile phones are currently held by the force having been recovered by officers? 

Request 2
How many stolen or suspected stolen phones have been recovered by the force in the past five years? If possible it would be helpful if this data is broken down by year.

Request 3
Of these, how many have successfully been returned to their owners?

I understand that questions 2 and 3 will be harder to answer (I imagine the first one could be answered with a simple inventory check) so if they are impossible to provide a clear response to I will accept an answer to just question one.

Request 4
Any relevant images of recovered devices would also be very helpful.

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 confirm that, while the information is held in our central database, it is not held in a retrievable format.  As the 'stolen' property classification isn't always routinely used, to retrieve the information requested would require a manual trawl of all mobile phone entries labelled as 'seized' or 'recovered by police' to determine if the involved property item was indeed stolen via the narrative data. We can further advise that for 2025 alone, there were 1953 mobile phones added to the PSNI property inventory, at a conservative 5 minutes per occurrence this would take approximately 162 hours to complete, grossly exceeding the legislative timeframe of 18 hours.

Please note that 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.                        
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/foi/freedom-of-information-and-environmental-information-regulations/recognising-a-request-made-under-the-freedom-of-information-act-section-8/

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 to system limitations and the reasoning set out above, we are unable to offer any further refinement.