FOI 0787-2025/26- Firework incident

Request:

Q1. Fireworks-related incidents generally

Please provide the total number of anti-social behaviour (ASB) incidents involving fireworks recorded by your force for each of the years 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.

Q2. Fireworks-related incidents involving pets or animals For each of those years, please indicate how many of these incidents involved domestic pets or companion animals (including any reports of injury, distress, or danger to such animals caused by fireworks).

If your recording system does not specifically identify incidents involving pets or companion animals, please instead provide the number of incidents that involved animals of any kind.

Q3. Outcomes

Where available, please indicate the final outcome or disposal of these incidents (for example: no further action, warning issued, community resolution, prosecution, referred to another agency, etc.).

If outcome data are available for the animal-related subset of incidents, please provide a separate breakdown for those cases.

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 firework incidents are not a specific incident to search upon in order to retrieve the requested information for Q2 a search has been conducted of ASB incidents for the timeframe specified where the term ‘firework’ is mentioned in the occurrence summary. These results would need to be manually reviewed to establish if it related to an animal being involved.

In relation to Q3 an outcome would only be recorded if the ASB incident resulted in a crime being recorded, none of those described above resulted in a crime this would need to manually reviewed to establish what type of outcome was issued.

This manual process for both questions 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 could provide you with the number of ASB incidents where the term ‘firework’ is mentioned within the occurrence summary.  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.