FOI York Stone Thefts (1236-2023/24)

Request

I'm contacting you to make a Freedom of Information request on reported crimes involving the theft of York stone both from pavements and buildings in your force area alongside an additional, wider FOI request on reports of ‘heritage crime’ in the force area.

I would like to request the following information:

1. Please can you give me year-by-year statistics for reported thefts or unlicensed removal of York stone flagstones across the force area for the period January 2019 to January 2024?

2. Please can you confirm how many of these reports were investigated by the force each calendar year in the same period and of those how many led to convictions?

3. Please can you provide year-by-year statistics for reported thefts or unlicensed removal of York stone from buildings across the force area for the period January 2019 to January 2024?

4. Please can you confirm how many of these reports were investigated by the force each calendar year in the same period and of those how many led to convictions?

5. For the same period (Jan 2019 to Jan 2024) can you please confirm the number of reports of ‘heritage crimes’ in the force area? Heritage crime is defined by Historic England as, “Any offence involving damage or loss to the historic environment, including all such offences involving cultural property”.

6. Please can you also confirm how many of those reports for the same period were investigated by the force and of those how many led to convictions?

Response

Extent of Searches to Locate Information

Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision

I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested, if held, is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information. In order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review all crimes within he timeframe requested to determine which were related to York Stone theft and / or removal. This would involve thousands of reports, which would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act. 

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). However, we may be able to do a free text search for all crimes which feature certain words or terms including ‘York stone’ however, a free text search does come with its own issues in that the word York may also bring up a number of reports that are not relevant to your request. This may further trigger an excess cost exemption. If you would like us to run a free text search you would need to resubmit your request with an exhaustive list of all terms you wish us to search. If you wish to discuss this please do not hesitate to contact me.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.