FOI-1036-2025 / Oct 2025 / Thefts by delivery drivers
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST REFERENCE NO: 1036-2025
I write in connection with your request for information which was received on 16th October 2025 as follows:
Please provide the information requested for incidents recorded in the each of the periods:
- 2024–2025 to date (16th October 2025)
- 2023–2024
- 2022–2023
Please answer questions 1–4 for all couriers and delivery drivers.
If possible, please also answer questions 5–8 for couriers/delivery drivers excluding food delivery drivers.
If you are unable to exclude food delivery drivers, please still provide the answers to questions 1-4.
- What’s the total number of thefts and robberies reported in which the victim was a courier or delivery driver?
- How many resulted in someone being arrested?
- How many resulted in someone being charged?
- How many involved a report of violence? If you are unable to answer this question because it is too time consuming, please still answer questions 1, 2 and 3.
- What’s the total number of thefts and robberies reported in which the victim was a courier or delivery driver, excluding food delivery drivers?
- How many resulted in someone being arrested?
- How many resulted in someone being charged?
- How many involved a report of violence? If you are unable to answer this question because it is too time consuming, please still answer questions 5, 6 and 7.
Please find the Warwickshire Police response set out below.
Response: Please be advised that the requested information is not available in a readily retrievable format. Although there is an occupation field within the Crime Recording System, this is a drop-down field with limited choice, is not mandatory and is often not completed. Further, if the field has been completed it is not linked to an individual crime, but to a person, and can be added to at any time. Previous information is kept on the person record when new occupation details are added. Therefore, a search for individuals with a specific occupation type would return all records in relation to that individual, regardless of when the occupation was recorded or whether it had subsequently changed. Even if relevant occupations were returned in any given search, it would be necessary to determine, in each case, whether the occupation was relevant to the specific crime in question and, in the event that an individual had been both a victim and a suspect of crime at different times, it would be necessary to determine which role was relevant to an offence. For these reasons, the occupation field is not a reliable search option.
Further, keyword searches are not carried out routinely as they are not reliable, they will only bring back records where the chosen keyword(s) is present within the MO Description / Incident Summary of an investigation; these are limited free text fields and do not contain all information in relation to an investigation.
Therefore, in order to determine the number of offences where a victim referenced as being a courier/delivery driver, it would be necessary to individually review the wider investigation documentation for each and every robbery offence, and every relevant theft offence, recorded during the stated period. It would then be necessary to review the identified records to ascertain the further information requested. As you will appreciate, this would involve an inordinate amount of work which would excessively exceed 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. For Police forces in the UK, the ‘appropriate limit’ is up to 18 hours (£450) of work on one request.
In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this element of the request and, if one part of a request exceeds the fees limit, then s12 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; however, due to the volume of records which would need to be individually reviewed, I am unable to suggest a way to reduce your request into one which could be managed within the fees limit.
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