Illegal entrants data 2017-2024

Request
Please kindly provide details of numbers of individuals stopped and
searched; arrested; charged with offences who have been identified by
police as being illegal entrants to the United Kingdom or have no form
of identification or no fixed abode.
By illegal entrants we mean:
(1) those who entered the UK without leave or who have absconded after
being granted temporary admission (these include entrants by way of
airports, channel crossings or via vehicles)
(2) those who enter in breach of a deportation order;
(3) those who have secured leave by means of material deception.
The information is sought for the years from 2017 to 2024 (or latest
available figures)

Response
Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires South Yorkshire
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.

The following exemption(s) apply to the disclosure of the information:

Section 12(1) - Exemption where cost of compliance exceeds
appropriate limit
We hold information that falls under the scope of your request. However,
locating/retrieving/extracting the information would exceed the cost limit set
out by section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA).

I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request.
The initial search of this system returned over 1,000,000 Incident reports
regarding illegal entrants. The data you are requesting is not recorded in an
easily retrievable format and to provide the level of data you require would
require a manual review of all the records. At a conservative 2 mins per
incident this process would take over 33,000 hrs.

In essence, we would have to review and manually check all relevant
incidents to extract the level of detail of the cases that met the criteria of your
request; this process would take much longer than 18 hours' work.

The Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limit and Fees)
Regulations 2004 provide that the cost limit for non-central government public
authorities is £450. This must be calculated at the rate of £25 per hour,
providing an effective time limit of 18 hours.

Guidance from the Information Commissioner to public authorities is that
where one part of a request is reasonably estimated to exceed the
appropriate limit then the authority is not obliged to consider or comply with
the remainder of the request up to the point at which the appropriate limit has
been reached. Please note point 30 of the below link:

https://ico.org.uk/media/fororganisations/documents/1199/costs_of_compliance_exceeds_appropriate_li
mit.pdf

Section 16
Under Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, my duty to provide
advice and assistance to anyone making a request for information.
Although excess cost removes the force's obligations under the Freedom 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 of your request neither does it bind South
Yorkshire Police to any commitment that it will release information in such a
manner in the future.

I approached our custody record administrator, who provided me with the
following:

Arrested foreign nationals whose immigration status is recorded as 'illegal'

Custody Reference Number begins with 14AX , 14BX , 14GX
and "Dim Committed On Date"."Committed On Date" BETWEEN date '2017-12-05'
AND current_date and Immigration Status Desc 1 is equal to / is in Illegal
and Detention Authorised is not null

Please note: Our current record management system didn't go live until 5th December
2017

Below is a count of all 'illegal' immigrant detainees and a sub-table showing how many
of them were charged.

Charged:

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 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