This report was created with the collaboration of Richard Ryan, barrister at Blakiston Chambers. Once again Richard is making a difference for the entire UK drone industry.

Public scrutiny over the safety of police drone operations is intensifying after the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) issued a blunt refusal to disclose risk assessments and safety summaries for its controversial Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) and ‘Drones as First Responders’ (DFR) trials.

The refusal, framed as a measure to prevent the police body from exceeding the statutory cost limit for Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, exposed a worrying lack of centralised record-keeping for what the NPCC itself describes as its “core business”.

The refusal notice, issued on 5 December 2025 by the National Police Freedom of Information and Data Protection Unit, cited Section 17 and Section 12 of the FOIA, claiming the cost of compliance would exceed the ‘appropriate limit’ of £450, equating to more than 18 hours of work.

The majority of this burden stemmed from a request for safety case summaries and operational concepts related to BVLOS and DFR trials (Question 4). Crucially, the NPCC admitted that “there is no single repository for this information”.

Instead, the information—which covers concepts, use cases, safety cases including risk identification, mitigation, training, procurement, resting and evaluation, stakeholder engagement, data capture and recording and so on—is scattered across staff folders and mailboxes, covering the three-year BVLOS Pathway Programme and DFR, which has run for two years.

Initial manual searches conducted by the NPCC confirmed that at least 28 individuals would need to complete these searches.

A dip sample of just one individual conducting keyword searches for ‘BVLOS’ returned 13,003 results, while ‘Drones as First Responders’ returned 10,331 results respectively, demonstrating the scale of the retrieval problem.

The NPCC’s decision to refuse access to these vital documents leaves the public unable to scrutinise the safety protocols underpinning the advanced drone operations now being piloted in areas including London and Coventry.

Accident Investigation Confirmed

The refusal comes in the wake of a specific incident that raised serious public concern: the Isle of Sheppey incident on 2 August 2025, involving a Kent Police drone striking an overhead cable and injuring a child.

Despite the NPCC refusing to provide information on the Isle of Sheppey incident, advising the requester to contact the relevant local force, Kent Constabulary, directly, two independent aviation bodies confirmed their involvement.

The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) confirmed it was notified of the occurrence on the evening of 2nd August 2025 and immediately began a safety investigation under the reference AAIB-31099. Furthermore, the AAIB revealed that the incident is far from isolated; since 1 January 2023, the AAIB has received 10 notifications involving police-operated Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), leading to the commencement of six safety investigations.

Regulatory Opacity and Safety Data Blocked

The response from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) highlighted significant 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, but stated it is “not conducting an investigation”. More critically, the CAA admitted it “does not hold guidance nor a memorandum of understanding” specifically governing incident notification or investigation responsibilities for state aircraft (police) drones.

In a move that severely limits public access to system-wide safety information, the CAA invoked Section 44(2) of the FOIA to neither confirm nor deny holding statistical summaries or anonymised Mandatory Occurrence Report (MOR) data concerning police-UAS accidents.

The CAA claimed that releasing this MOR data is prohibited under Assimilated Regulation (EU) No. 376/2014, arguing that effective occurrence reporting relies on trust, and disclosure is only permitted for the purpose of “maintaining or improving aviation safety”.

While the AAIB advised that it does not hold statistical MOR information and directed the requester to the CAA, the CAA’s decision to use a regulatory exemption to block confirmation of whether the data even exists raises serious questions about the transparency of safety reporting within Britain’s airspace.