Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to Answer of 26 October 2021 to Question 56399 on Reoffenders, what offences the 670 defendants were accused of; and whether the defendants were explicitly informed that conviction would involve having a disclosable criminal record.

Below we have provided data which breaks down the initial estimate of the 670 defendants who were dealt with at the magistrates’ courts under SJP where the offence was deemed ‘recordable on the PNC’. We are not able to say whether the defendants were explicitly informed that conviction would involve having a disclosable criminal record.

636 offences have been recorded as ‘other offences’ because the recorded proceedings type (SJP) is incompatible with the available penalties for that offence. These recording inconsistencies represent less than 1% of the total SJP caseload of around 490,000 defendants dealt with in the year to March 2021.