Van Thefts (1403A/21)

3 March 2022 | Incident and Crime Statistics

Request

Response

Please be advised that all the information that you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. The form of entry regarding vehicle thefts is not held in an electronically searchable format. Therefore it would require a manual review of all Theft of Vehicle records in order for us to identify the relevant information for your request. Therefore 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, In accordance with Section 16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request as follows.

Please be advised that there is not a specific recording category for van theft and these are included under the category of Theft of Vehicle. However, for the time period 01/08/2016 – 06/04/2021 the force was using a recording system that that had a sub category description of `van`. The results of the searches from this recording system are shown below:

	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun	Jul	Aug	Sep	Oct	Nov	Dec
2016								59	69	72	77	88
2017	91	98	95	109	94	83	93	112	88	101	109	97
2018	140	140	115	100	123	127	153	137	137	158	152	91
2019	135	122	142	123	132	135	112	131	141	134	107	104
2020	145	115	104	77	84	82	82	108	140	142	153	92
2021	101	78	86	11

 

This should not be taken as a precedent that additional information would be supplied outside of the time/fees legislation for any subsequent requests. Please note that this may contain attempt theft records, and also records whereby a van was used in the commission of the offence rather than being the item of theft – the force is unable to quality assure this data to remove erroneous inclusions as this would require a manual review of records that would exceed the time/fees limit. Records that do not have van recorded as the sub category description would not have been retrieved and supplied.

The force has changed to a new recording system and this currently does not have a property category filter so the same information cannot be provided for 07/04/21 onwards.

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