Asked by: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough, Oadby and Wigston)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people in prison for offences of (a) violence against the person, (b) sexual offences, (c) robbery, (d) theft offences, (e) criminal damage and arson, (f) drug offences, (g) possession of weapons, (h) public order offences, (i) miscellaneous crimes against society, (j) fraud offences, (k) summary non-motoring, (l) summary motoring and (m) offence not recorded are of (i) Asian or Asian British, (ii) Black or Black British, (iii) Mixed, (iv) White, (v) Chinese or other, (vi) not stated and (vii) unrecorded ethnicity.
Answered by Nicholas Dakin - Government Whip, Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury
The requested information is shown in the attached table.
Asked by: Peter Bedford (Conservative - Mid Leicestershire)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if she plans to review the governance of the Sentencing Council.
Answered by Nicholas Dakin - Government Whip, Lord Commissioner of HM Treasury
The Lord Chancellor is currently undertaking a review of the Sentencing Council’s role and powers and has indicated that she will introduce reforms in future legislation, if considered necessary
Asked by: Neil Duncan-Jordan (Labour - Poole)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether she plans to introduce AI integration and camera use in family law proceedings.
Answered by Sarah Sackman - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is at the heart of the Government’s plan to kickstart an era of economic growth, transform how we deliver public services, and boost living standards for working people across the country. Within the Ministry of Justice, we are testing and adopting AI to improve the experience and efficiency within our courts.
AI has the potential to enable service improvements across HM Courts & Tribunals Service, and we are exploring how it can be applied responsibly to our operations and services, including to support document processing, transcription, summarisation and translation. The use of AI in the courts and tribunals will be focused on accelerating and assisting people’s work, not automating decisions.
All use of artificial intelligence in the Ministry of Justice is aligned with the AI Playbook for the UK Government and the Algorithmic Transparency Reporting Standard. The Lady Chief Justice and Senior President of Tribunals issued AI Guidance for the judiciary in December 2023.
There are currently no live AI or predictive analytics systems in use in the Family Courts.
We are running early-stage discovery and proof of concept projects to test the potential value of AI in the Family Courts as follows:
Remote hearings in family proceedings, often conducted via telephone or video conferencing, are already regularly used where the judge with conduct of the case feels it is appropriate.
Asked by: Lord Swire (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask His Majesty's Government what is the total annual cost of providing legal aid to foreign nationals appealing a deportation order or contesting a criminal conviction.
Answered by Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede - Lord in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)
Information on foreign national offenders contesting a criminal conviction is not centrally held.
Expenditure relating to deportation and removal appeals is published as part of the Legal Aid Agency’s Official Statistics as part of its ‘detailed civil data’ collection. Data for the last ten years can be found in the table below. Please note that due to the way information is recorded it is not possible to distinguish between costs relating to deportation matters (concerning foreign national offenders) and those relating to removal matters (e.g. individual’s whose asylum or immigration applications have been unsuccessful).
Financial Year | Immigration Deportation/Removal Appeal - Total Costs |
2014-15 | £875,322 |
2015-16 | £662,880 |
2016-17 | £615,822 |
2017-18 | £552,301 |
2018-19 | £516,453 |
2019-20 | £931,934 |
2020-21 | £767,773 |
2021-22 | £858,623 |
2022-23 | £878,051 |
2023-24 | £955,947 |
Asked by: Andrew Mitchell (Conservative - Sutton Coldfield)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps she is taking to reduce the backlog of crown court cases in the West Midlands.
Answered by Sarah Sackman - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This Government inherited a record and rising courts backlog. For this financial year (2025/26), this Government is funding a record allocation of Crown Court sitting days to deliver swifter justice for victims – 110,000 sitting days this year, 4,000 higher than the last Government funded. However, the scale of the challenge is beyond what increasing sitting days can achieve. That is why we have commissioned Sir Brian Leveson to conduct a review of efficiency that will propose once-in-a-generation reform to deliver swifter justice for victims.
In the West Midlands: