FOI 419025
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 419025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 2nd July 2025. Please find below the response to your request:
Please provide the number of recorded incidents of tool thefts from vehicles in the area for the years 2023 and 2024, broken down by month.
If a monthly breakdown requires too much admin time then an overall figure of thefts from vehicles where tools were the stolen property would suffice.
Reply
Your request for information has been considered in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (“the Act”), and I am not obliged to provide the information requested.
S.12(1) of the Act states that a public authority is not obliged to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the “appropriate limit”. For police forces in England and Wales, the "appropriate limit" is £450 or 18 hours of work as set by the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.
The information you have requested is not available in a readily retrievable format. There is no specific offence for ‘tool theft from a vehicle’. This would be recorded as the offence Theft from a Motor Vehicle and would require a key word search in the Incident Summary field for %TOOL%.
This returned 538 offences. We would need to manually review all these offences to identify any false positives such as where a tool has been used to break into the vehicle. Therefore, in order to ascertain whether the information you have requested is held would take in excess of 18 hours as each record would have to be checked individually.
In accordance with s.17(5) of the Act, this acts as a Refusal Notice.
Under s.16 of the Act I have a duty to provide advice and assistance in relation to your request.
Unfortunately, due to the volume of records that would need to be reviewed I am unable to identify information that could be supplied within the fees limit.