Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether all work required to implement recommendation 12 of the Lammy Review has been completed.

We welcomed the Lammy Review in 2017 and committed to taking actions against each of the recommendations from the Review, bar the two for the independent judiciary. Where a recommendation could not be implemented exactly as set out, alternative approaches were sought to tackle the same issue. Now, almost all of the actions we originally committed have been carried out.

Recommendation 12 of the Review states that “the Open Justice initiative should be extended and updated so that it is possible to view sentences for individual offences at individual courts, broken down by demographic characteristics, including gender and ethnicity”.

Since 2017, as we committed to, we have been increasing the availability of demographic data on our justice system users. Experts can now access more detailed data, including on ethnicity and other protected characteristics, through our pioneering data-linking programme Data First. This is providing new insights in a way that has not been possible before, by linking data from across the justice system and making it available for independent academic research. The Data First datasets provide detailed information on defendants and their outcomes, enabling new research exploring sentencing and case outcomes, broken down by demographic characteristics, including ethnicity and gender.

Outside of this programme court outcomes for individual offences and protected characteristics are publicly available and can be found in the Criminal Justice Statistics quarterly. This publication produces tools on an annual basis by demographic characteristics, offence information, and by Police Force Area. Currently, data for individual courts can be produced upon request, and we are exploring ways to develop these data further, balancing user needs and accessibility.