Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 14 February 2018 to Question 127040, on courts: video conferencing, what estimate his Department made of the cost of providing the information sought.

The information requested, which was the number of child defendants to appear in court via live video link in each year since 2010, broken down by the type of hearing and the number of defendants with certain types of vulnerabilities, could only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

MoJ does not collect data centrally that distinguishes appearance by video link by type of hearing or by age. Whilst this data is not held on our systems, some of this information would be included in individual case files retained at the courts.

In most cases, court files are destroyed after three years, in line with the normal MoJ Record Retention and Disposition Schedule. In order to retrieve the data for the period October 2014-September 2017 it would be necessary to examine 288,710 individual case records. MoJ estimates that the total disproportionate cost would be £842,070.