FOI 435/25
REQUEST
- How many reports of making off without payment (MOWP) has your force recorded between January 2020 and January 2025? Please break this information down by month and calendar year.
- My understanding is your force may log when a MOWP offence specifically occurs at a petrol station/forecourt. Therefore, over the same period, how many reports has your force recorded relating to people driving off from petrol filling stations without attempting to pay, colloquially known as ‘drive offs’, or driving off without paying for fuel? Please also break this information down on a month-by month and year-by-year basis. If the following addition would not cause this request to exceed the 18-hour time limit, please include a breakdown of how many of these instances related to the theft of petrol, and how many to diesel, each year.
- Over the same period, please provide, if possible, the recorded value of the fuel taken in drive-offs, broken down month-by-month and year-by-year.
- Please provide a resolution/clear-up report on drive-off offences over the same five years – EG numbers of summons, community resolutions, undetected etc, broken down month-by-month and year-by-year.
- Please inform me, if possible, the names of the five petrol stations that reported the most drive-off offences for each of the five years in question, including details of the value of fuel taken from each station each year, broken down year by year.
If reviewing five years’ worth of data to would exceed the 18-hour time limit for completing FOI requests, please provide this information for the past three years (IE January 2022 to January 2025). If this is also too onerous, please provide this information for Jan 2023 to Jan 2025; and if this is too onerous, please data from Jan 2024 to Jan 2025, broken down month-by-month.
RESPONSE
Your request for information has now been considered and I am not obliged to supply the information you have requested.
Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Wales 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.
In relation to your particular request, the following exemption applies:
Section 12 – Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit.
A search has been conducted for all crimes recorded under the Home Office (HO) offence code ‘53/25: Making off without payment’ between 1st January 2020 and 1st January 2025. This search retrieved 3,544 results.
A second search was conducted for crimes recorded under the same HO code ‘53/25: Making off without payment’ between 1st January 2023 and 1st January 2025. This retrieved 1,451 results.
The data was then filtered to ‘Petrol Filling Station’ under the tertiary address. This brought back 640 results.
We estimate that it would take approximately 10 minutes to individually interrogate each occurrence on our crime and incident recording system (Niche RMS) in order to ascertain the type of fuel stolen (question 2), the value of the fuel (question 3) and to establish the five petrol stations that reported the most drive-off offences (question 5).
We therefore estimate that it would take in excess of 106 hours to answer these parts of your request.
It is estimated that the cost of providing you with the information 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.
In the case of the police service, the appropriate limit is £450 which has been calculated to equate to a total of 18 hours of work.
If any part of the request exceeds the fees limit then Section 12 applies to the whole request.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a refusal notice.
Excess cost removes the forces obligation under the Freedom of Information Act, however under Section 16 – Duty to provide advice and assistance, an authority is required to offer an applicant the opportunity to redefine their request within the cost limit. If you were to resubmit your request asking for questions 1 and 4 only then we may be able to assist. We may also be able to assist with confirming whether the crime took place at a petrol station (question 2), should you also like to resubmit this part of your request.