Livestock worrying (FOI ref: 524/26)

Request

I am requesting the following information relating to reports your force has received about dogs attacking or chasing livestock since 1 January 2021 - December 2025:

1. The number of reports your force has received where a dog was reported to have attacked or chased livestock (please include a yearly breakdown: 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025).

2. The number of fines and fixed penalty notices issued as a result of these reports, broken down by year.

3. The number of dogs seized under the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Act 1953 (Section 2), broken down by year.

Response

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

This is because, there is no flag or marker on our incident system that allows us to identify reports of the nature described. Therefore, to determine the requested information, we would need to manually review all incident logs created in the past five years. However, with thousands of such logs created each month such a task would be a huge undertaking and far exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).

This means 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 confirming or denying that the information is held would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12(2) as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this request.

Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:

Freedom of information | College of Policing - Section 12

However, 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 before it was realised that the fees limit would be exceeded (see as follows). I trust this is helpful, but it does not affect our legal right to rely on the fees regulations for the remainder of the request:

A search of our crime system for the offence of ‘Person in charge/owner of a dog of a dog worrying livestock’ (Home Office Code 111/05) produced no (zero) results. Additionally, we can find no record of any dog being seized under the Dogs (Protection of Livestock) Act 1953 (Section 2).