Theft of parcels
Date of request: 22 December 2025
Reference: 12968500/26
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please provide the following information held by your police force.
For the most recent 24-month period for which data is available, please provide:
The total number of recorded crimes involving the theft of delivered parcels from:
– Residential doorsteps, and
– Designated ‘safe places’ (e.g. porches, sheds, bins, garages).
Please include:
– A monthly breakdown (month and year)
– The crime classification or offence code used to record these incidents.
2. Criminal Damage Associated With Deliveries
For the same 24-month period, please provide:
The total number of recorded incidents of criminal damage to residential property where:
– The damage was recorded as being caused by delivery personnel
– The damage occurred during or immediately following a delivery.
Please include:
– A monthly breakdown (month and year)
– The crime classification or offence code used.
Additional Information
If the term ‘porch piracy’ is not used by your force, please interpret this request using the closest equivalent offence categories (for example, theft from outside a dwelling).
Preferred Format
Please provide the information in CSV or Excel format, where possible.
24-month period up to November/December 2025 if possible
Response
Your request has been considered, and I regret to advise you that your request is refused under Section 12 of the Act because we estimate that the cost of retrieving the requested information would exceed the cost limits under the Act.
This is because the information requested is not centrally recorded and would involve an extensive search of individual records to find and collate it. Whilst we can search for the offence of ‘Theft of mail bag or postal packet’, we are unable to identify where the items were stolen from, i.e. whether they were taken from a doorstep, garage, shed without a manual review of the crime MO, crime summary or log of enquiries.
A manual review would also be required for question 2 as each incident of criminal damage would need to be reviewed to see if it is recorded that the criminal damage was associated with a delivery. Furthermore, the profession of those accused or causing the damage and whether the damage occurred ‘during or immediately following a delivery’ is not recorded in an easily extractable form.
With over 26,000 criminal damage and theft of a mail bag or postal packet records to review, it is estimated it would take considerably longer than 18 hours to comply.
Section 12 makes provision for public authorities to refuse requests for information where the cost of compliance would exceed the appropriate limit, which for police authorities is set at £450 or 18 staff hours work. This represents the estimated cost of one person spending 2.5 working days in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting it.
This letter represents a Refusal Notice under the Act.
If you would like to refine your request to bring it down to a more manageable level, we may be able to supply you with some of the information you require. This can be done by requesting the number of offences recorded as ‘Theft of mail bag or postal packet’ only and omitting question 2.
You may also be interested in the published response on our website Parcel theft 2021 – August 2025 | Avon and Somerset Police