Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make it her policy to collect data on the period of time between a child being detained in police custody and an Appropriate Adult being in attendance.

Data on people, including children, detained in police custody were collected for the first time for the year ending March 2022. Information was also requested on the number of minutes taken for an Appropriate Adult (AA) to arrive.

As this was the first year of data collection, information collected on the number of minutes for an AA to arrive was limited and of poor quality. As such, these data were not published as part of the ‘Police, Powers and Procedures: Other PACE, year ending March 2022’ publication.

The police custody data published on GOV.UK are based on a subset of 26 out of 43 territorial police forces and are labelled as Experimental statistics due to data quality issues, therefore should be interpreted with caution

An assessment will be made later on this year on the quality of the data received for the year ending March 2023 and whether it will be fit for publication.