Charity crimes 262/2025

FOI Reference: 262/2025

Request

I am writing to request information regarding crimes reported to Dyfed-Powys Police by charities and not-for-profit organisations. Specifically, I would like to request the following data:

1. The number of crimes reported by charities and not-for-profit organisations, broken down by town/city and year, for the past five years (or the most recent available period).
2. A breakdown of these crimes by type of offence (e.g., fraud, theft, arson etc.).

Clarification sought

Are you referring to incidents or crimes? Please note an incident is different from a crime.  An incident is a record of contact made to a police force by an individual/member of public (usually via a 999 or 101 call) and a crime is where the threshold has been met for the police force to deem that a criminal offence has occurred as defined by law.

For what time period are you requesting this information, would this be the last 5 calendar or financial years?

Clarification received

Would it be possible to have incidents and crimes?

Calendar years, please.

Response

Section 1 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 places two duties on public authorities. Unless exemptions apply, the first duty at Section 1(1) (a) is to confirm or deny whether the information specified in a request is held. The second duty at Section 1(1) (b) is to disclose information that has been confirmed as being held.

Where exemptions are relied upon Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Dyfed Powys Police, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which:   (a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

I can confirm that Dyfed-Powys Police does hold the information you have requested. However, we are withholding the whole of the requested information since we consider that the Section 12(1) exemption the Cost of Compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit applies to it.

Section 12 (1) – The cost of compliance exceeds the Appropriate Limit

Section 12(1) states: “…Section 1 (1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.”

The cost of providing you with the information requested in respect of your request 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. It is estimated that it would exceed 18 hours (i.e. minimum of 64,096 hours) to comply with this part of your request. The regulations can be located @ https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/3244

The Freedom of Information department has been advised that the information in respect of your request is not held in an easily retrievable format. In light of this and in order to accurately obtain the information relative to your request for the time frame stipulated would involve Dyfed Powys Police accessing and manually reviewing 384,579 records, as we cannot keyword search to filter for the information requested for ‘crimes and incidents involving charities and non-profit organisations’. Therefore, cannot narrow down the search to just charity premises. 

These calls would have been categorised by the individual charity or business name.

It has also been established that it would take a minimum of 10 minutes to review and obtain the information for a single record in respect of your request. 

The process outlined results in the below time estimate.

Manual trawl of all crimes to identify this information would involve the following:-

2019 – 32586 Records

2020 – 31796 Records

2021 – 40433 Records

2022 – 45042 Records

2023 – 15469 + 23260 Records

2024 – 37580 Records

226,166 (total records) x 10 minutes = 37,694 hours (a)

Manual trawl of all incidents to identify this information would involve the following:-

2020  - 23,827

2021  - 25,388

2022  - 30,281

2023  - 42,938

2024  - 35,979

158,413 total records x 10 minutes = 26,402 hours (b)

37,694(a) + 26,402(b) = 64,096 hours

Time estimate to complete task =  64,096 hours

In accordance therefore with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for the Whole of this request under Section 17(5) A public authority which, in relation to any request for information, is relying on a claim that section 12 or section 14 applies must, within the time for complying with section 1(1), give the applicant a notice stating that fact.

You may wish to refine and resubmit your request so that it reduces the time shown above to fall within the 18 hours, should you require any further advice in relation to this matter please don’t hesitate to contact the Freedom of Information Unit. Please also be advised that should the request be refined, it does not remove the public authorities right to cite exemptions if relevant.

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(This is a response under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 and disclosed on 31/03/2025)