Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if she will make an estimate of the number of 15-21 year olds that have been prosecuted for violent crime involving a weapon in the last 12 months.

The Ministry of Justice publishes data on the number of defendants prosecuted, which can be filtered to specific offences and broken down by age range of defendants. This can be obtained in the Outcomes by Offences data tool, which can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2023.

However, data held centrally does not include information on whether a weapon was involved in the course of a violent offence. This information may be held on court records but to examine individual court records would be of disproportionate costs.