Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people convicted of driving while disqualified were subsequently convicted of (a) committing further road offences, (b) causing serious injury and (c) causing death while driving in each year since 2010.

Driving offences can have very serious and sometimes devastating consequences for victims and their families. The Government is changing the law to increase maximum sentences for disqualified drivers who cause deaths and serious injuries and to make sure driving disqualifications continue after an offender leaves prison.

The Ministry of Justice Court Proceeding Database holds information on offences provided by the statute under which proceedings are brought but not all the specific circumstances of each case. Details on disqualification from driving are not available from the information provided centrally to the Ministry of Justice. This detailed information is not reported due to their size and complexity and as such, it can only be obtained at disproportionate cost.

The Ministry of Justice’s extract of the Police National Computer (PNC), which MoJ uses to publish official statistics on offenders’ criminal histories, only holds information on those offenders who were cautioned or convicted for recordable offences in England and Wales.

To get information on subsequent convictions whilst disqualified from driving would require a lengthy, manual data matching process between these two data sources which have no unique or common identifier for the offenders, which due to its size and complexity will incur disproportionate cost.