FOI 876-2025 / Aug 2025 / Bike thefts

FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 876-2025

I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 21^st August 2025 as follows:

Q1. How many bike thefts have been reported for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial year’s instead of calendar years, please indicate.

Q2. How many of these stolen bikes have been recovered and returned to their owners? Please provide the response for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial year’s instead of calendar years, please indicate.

Q3. How many arrests/convictions have there been relating to the stolen bikes? Please provide the response for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025 (to date)? Please provide the quantity per year. That’s each year running from January to December, if possible. If you work in financial year’s instead of calendar years, please indicate.

Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below. 

Response: Please be advised that some of the requested information is not centrally recorded and is therefore not held in a readily retrievable format. With regards to Q2 and the number of stolen bikes recovered and returned, it would be necessary to manually review the investigation for each offence of ‘Theft or Unauthorised Taking of Pedal Cycle’ on an individual basis. The business area has provided a response to Q1 as part of a scoping exercise, which is set out below:

*Up to 31st July 2025

This shows a total of 2,325 offences for the stated period.  At an average of 5 minutes per offence to review this would equate to 194 hours of work for this part of the request.  Therefore, this would exceed the amount to which we are legally required to respond, i.e., the cost of locating and retrieving the requested information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.  For Police forces in the UK, the "appropriate limit" is up to 18 hours of work on one request.

In accordance with Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this part of the request, and, if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit, then section 12 of the Act applies to the whole request.

In accordance with Section 16 of the Act, I have a duty to provide advice and assistance on refining your request; however, due to the volume of records that would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce this part of the request into one that could be managed within the fees limit.

As a gesture of goodwill and to provide assistance, please find below a response to Q3 regarding arrests. The below table refers to the number of times a Custody Reference (denoting an arrest) has been linked to the crimes returned at Q1. However, please note that the same Custody Reference (arrest) may be linked to more than one crime. In addition, if a custody reference has not been correctly linked, this will not have been returned. For these reasons, arrest data retrieved in this manner cannot be considered to be entirely reliable.

*Up to 31st July 2025

Every effort has been made to ensure that the information provided is as accurate as possible.

Your attention is drawn to the below which details your right of complaint.

Should you have any further enquiries concerning this matter, please write or email the Freedom of Information Unit quoting the reference number above.

Yours sincerely

Freedom of Information Officer

Freedom of Information Unit
Warwickshire Police

PO Box 4

Leek Wootton

Warwickshire

CV35 7QB

[email protected]