Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many serious crimes were solved by communications data since 2010; what the classification of those crimes was; and how many serious crimes there were in that period.

As my Right Honourable Friend, the Home Secretary, made clear in the statement
made to the House on 10 July, Official Report, columns 456-459, communications
data is an absolutely fundamental tool in the investigation of serious crime.
The Crown Prosecution Service Organised Crime Division has indicated that
communications data plays a role in 95% of the serious and organised crime
cases that they handle. An Association of Chief Police Officers' survey from
2012 demonstrated the wide range of serious crime types that communications
data is used to investigate, including terrorism, drugs trafficking and child
abuse. Total crime figures, recorded by the police, and including breakdowns
by crime type, can be found on the Office for National Statistics website.

Law enforcement agencies do not routinely make a record of all of the
investigatory techniques that they use when investigating individual crimes, as
there is no operational reason to do so. However, Keith Bristow, Director
General of the National Crime Agency, made clear in his speech to the Police
Foundation on 24 June that communications data is most commonly used in the
investigation of the most serious offences, such as murder, rape and kidnap,
and that communications data is overwhelmingly the most powerful tool available
to those investigating child sexual exploitation.