Stolen Vehicles (1109A/23)
Request
- Total number of stolen vehicles recorded in the period 2020-2022 including:
- The make and model of the vehicle
- Whether the vehicle was recovered
- Manner of entry to the vehicle
Response
Our data are not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide all of this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.
This is because there are no recording categories to capture what the manner of entry to the vehicle is. This means that to try to identify this detail, we would have to manually review the case files of each individual crime record, however, we have identified over 30,000 stolen vehicles recorded during the requested time period. With regard to question 3, though we have a recording category to denote if a vehicle’s status has been marked as recovered, this category is not always updated. Therefore, in order to identify accurate information for this we would need to manually review each individual record. Using an estimate of 5 minutes to review each record for the aforementioned details, this would equate to a search exceeding 2,800 hours of work which would far exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).
This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request and if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit then S12 of the Act applies to the whole request.
However, under Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request and can provide relevant information for questions 1 – 3 as this was retrieved during our initial research. Please see our response attached (1109A_Attachment).
This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests.
Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:
Please note that these data should be interpreted with caution. Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.