Cuckooing data 2015-2025

How many cases of cuckooing have your force dealt withbroken down by the following financial years 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023,2024, 2025.

I note that there is no specific Home Office code for “cuckooing”. However, this data is recorded bysome forces including the largest force in the UK. It is also worth noting that in the past forces havesearched in Modern Slavery Enquiries for links to potential cuckooing and have been able to findthe information within cost.

If 2015-2025 takes me over the cost limit, please send as many as possible with priority being themost recent years of data.

Response

Our data is not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate(cost) limit within the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act (see 'Reason for Decision' below).

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Yorkshire Police, when refusing toprovide such information (because the information is exempt), to provide you the applicant with a noticewhich:

a. states that fact,

b. specifies the exemption in question and

c. states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

The following exemption applies to the disclosure of the information:

Section 12(1) - Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds appropriate limit

For the data prior to 2019 - data is held on an historic system no longer in use and cannot be readilyextracted. Manual reviews would be required to find the data within the system, bringing cost into play.Therefore, this data cannot be located or retrieved in a readily retrievable format within cost, and as suchyour request would trigger the S12 cost exemption.

Section 16 - Duty to Provide advice and Assistance

Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, my duty to provide advice and assistance toanyone making a request for information, Although excess cost removes the force's obligations under theFreedom of Information Act, as a gesture of goodwill, I have supplied information, relative to your request,retrieved or available before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded.

I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder ofyour request neither does it bind South Yorkshire Police to any commitment that it will release informationin such a manner in the Future.

I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request. An analyst within this unit hasconducted a search of our Crime Management System - Connect which records complaints or allegationsof those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as 'crimes'. All our systems aredesigned and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with the following explanation regarding their search criteria:

Criteria used :–

SYP & crime only filter, Incident Created Fiscal Year is between 01/04/2018 and 25/01/2026, KeywordDesc is equal to / is in Cuckooing, Initial MO is LIKE (pattern match) %cuckooing%

Please note :–

• Extracted on 26/01/2026. Data from CONNECT crime only. This is a live recording system and maybe subject to change.

• It's worth noting that some fields used are not mandatory and require manual input.

• KEYWORDS / Spelling

Spelling mistakes and variations of keywords cannot be accounted for and as such may not becaptured and therefore may not be included.

Although every effort has been made to capture the information requested in full, keyword searchescan be unreliable. The reasons why searches using this method may not be reliable include (but arenot limited to) the following:

a) Spelling errors

b) Variations of the keywords

c) Non mandatory recording of keywords

Question 1

Please note, every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that data has been extracted from data sources used by this force for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording systems and information assets.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures/data for any requests may have limitations, and this should be taken into account when those data sets are used.  

Police forces do not use generic systems or identical procedures for capturing the data. For these reasons this response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with responses you may receive from other police forces.