FOI 0942-2025/26- Police incidents linked to asylum accommodation

Request:

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I request the following aggregate, non-personal statistical information relating to police activity associated with asylum accommodation within your force area.

To ensure this request remains within the Section 12 cost limit, I am requesting only information already held in aggregated, reportable, or management-level form. I am not requesting individual incident logs, address-level data, free-text narrative reports, or any personal data (Section 40).

Q1. Police incidents linked to asylum accommodation

For the period 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2024 (or the most recent 12-month period held), please provide:

a) The total number of recorded police incidents, call-outs, or deployments that are flagged, coded, or otherwise identifiable as relating to:

-   asylum accommodation;

-   contingency asylum hotels; or   

-   Home Office asylum accommodation sites

(using whatever existing internal flag, marker, or location-type classification your force applies).

In addition, please confirm whether the same aggregated dataset is held for the period 1 January 2025 to the date of this request, and if so, whether it can be disclosed without exceeding the Section 12 cost limit.

b) A breakdown of these incidents by high-level incident classification, using your force's standard categories (for example):

-   violence against the person  

-   public order

-   sexual offences  

-   domestic incidents   

-   criminal damage 

-   theft

-   safeguarding / welfare

-   missing person

c) The total number of arrests arising from these incidents (aggregate figure).

d) The total number of cases arising from these incidents where a file was submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service (aggregate figure).

Q2. Geographic aggregation (cost-saving option)

If force-wide data cannot be provided without exceeding the cost limit, please provide the above figures aggregated by Basic Command Unit / policing district / local policing area, rather than by individual accommodation site.

Q3. Data-recording clarification

Please confirm:

-   whether your force uses any specific flag, tag, or location-type marker to identify incidents linked to asylum accommodation; and

-   from what date such a marker has been in use (if applicable).

Clarification on narrative-derived summaries (existence only)

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not requesting individual narrative incident reports, free-text logs, or address-level records.

However, please confirm whether your force already holds any of the following in an existing, aggregated or standardised form in relation to incidents linked to asylum accommodation (for example, thematic summaries or supervisory closure codes):

-   anonymised thematic or trend summaries;

-   standardised supervisory closure categories or codes; or

-   management-level reports that draw on incident narratives at a summary level.

If such material is held, please confirm its existence only (a yes/no response is sufficient).

I am not requesting disclosure of the content of any such material as part of this request.

Section 12 safeguard

If any element of this request is considered likely to exceed the Section 12 cost limit, please:

provide the information that can be disclosed within the limit; and

advise how the remainder may be refined, in line with your duty under Section 1

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.

As asylum accommodation/hotels/accommodation sites is not something we can search upon specifically, in order to retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to manually review all crimes recorded within the timeframe specified to establish if it related to asylum accommodation/hotels/accommodation sites. This would mean reading through 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 provide some information if you provide the specific postcodes of the sites/hotels you require.  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.