This report was created with the collaboration of Richard Ryan, barrister at Blakiston Chambers. As soon as once more Richard is making a distinction for your entire UK drone trade.
Public scrutiny over the protection of police drone operations is intensifying after the Nationwide Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) issued a blunt refusal to reveal threat assessments and security summaries for its controversial Past Visible Line of Sight (BVLOS) and ‘Drones as First Responders’ (DFR) trials.
The refusal, framed as a measure to stop the police physique from exceeding the statutory price restrict for Freedom of Info (FOI) requests, uncovered a worrying lack of centralised record-keeping for what the NPCC itself describes as its “core enterprise”.
The refusal discover, issued on 5 December 2025 by the Nationwide Police Freedom of Info and Information Safety Unit, cited Part 17 and Part 12 of the FOIA, claiming the price of compliance would exceed the ‘acceptable restrict’ of £450, equating to greater than 18 hours of labor.
Nearly all of this burden stemmed from a request for security case summaries and operational ideas associated to BVLOS and DFR trials (Query 4). Crucially, the NPCC admitted that “there isn’t any single repository for this data”.
As an alternative, the knowledge—which covers ideas, use instances, security instances together with threat identification, mitigation, coaching, procurement, resting and analysis, stakeholder engagement, knowledge seize and recording and so forth—is scattered throughout employees folders and mailboxes, protecting the three-year BVLOS Pathway Programme and DFR, which has run for 2 years.
Preliminary handbook searches performed by the NPCC confirmed that at the very least 28 people would wish to finish these searches.
A dip pattern of only one particular person conducting key phrase searches for ‘BVLOS’ returned 13,003 outcomes, whereas ‘Drones as First Responders’ returned 10,331 outcomes respectively, demonstrating the dimensions of the retrieval downside.
The NPCC’s choice to refuse entry to those very important paperwork leaves the general public unable to scrutinise the protection protocols underpinning the superior drone operations now being piloted in areas together with London and Coventry.
Accident Investigation Confirmed
The refusal comes within the wake of a selected incident that raised critical public concern: the Isle of Sheppey incident on 2 August 2025, involving a Kent Police drone hanging an overhead cable and injuring a toddler.
Regardless of the NPCC refusing to supply data on the Isle of Sheppey incident, advising the requester to contact the related native pressure, Kent Constabulary, instantly, two unbiased aviation our bodies confirmed their involvement.
The Air Accidents Investigation Department (AAIB) confirmed it was notified of the prevalence on the night of 2nd August 2025 and instantly started a security investigation below the reference AAIB-31099. Moreover, the AAIB revealed that the incident is way from remoted; since 1 January 2023, the AAIB has acquired 10 notifications involving police-operated Unmanned Plane Methods (UAS), resulting in the graduation of six security investigations.
Regulatory Opacity and Security Information Blocked
The response from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) highlighted important regulatory gaps surrounding state-operated police drones.
The CAA confirmed it was notified of the Isle of Sheppey incident by the AAIB on 6 August 2025, however said it’s “not conducting an investigation”. Extra critically, the CAA admitted it “doesn’t maintain steerage nor a memorandum of understanding” particularly governing incident notification or investigation tasks for state plane (police) drones.
In a transfer that severely limits public entry to system-wide security data, the CAA invoked Part 44(2) of the FOIA to neither verify nor deny holding statistical summaries or anonymised Obligatory Incidence Report (MOR) knowledge regarding police-UAS accidents.
The CAA claimed that releasing this MOR knowledge is prohibited below Assimilated Regulation (EU) No. 376/2014, arguing that efficient prevalence reporting depends on belief, and disclosure is just permitted for the aim of “sustaining or bettering aviation security”.
Whereas the AAIB suggested that it doesn’t maintain statistical MOR data and directed the requester to the CAA, the CAA’s choice to make use of a regulatory exemption to dam affirmation of whether or not the info even exists raises critical questions concerning the transparency of security reporting inside Britain’s airspace.
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