Trials: Ethnic Groups

(asked on 15th May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent estimate he has made of the proportion of (a) BAME and (b) white defendants who enter guilty pleas.


Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 22nd May 2019

The proportion of guilty pleas (where plea was known) has slowly been declining, from 74% in 2014 to 69% for white defendants, and from 61% in 2014 to 57% for BAME defendants in 2018.

Data is only available for defendants dealt with at Crown Court (not all defendants) for indictable offences.

The proportion of defendants who entered a guilty plea by ethnicity (2008 – 2018) can be found in the Crown court data tool at the following link:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/802313/crown-court-tool-2018.xlsx

  • Remove the ‘Values’ field from Rows
  • Drag the ‘Ethnicity’ field into Rows
  • Drag the ‘Total for Trial’ field into Values
  • Filter to ’01: Guilty Plea’ in the ‘Plea at Crown Court’ field for the number of defendants that entered a guilty plea
  • Filter to ’01: Guilty Plea’ and ’02: Not Guilty plea’ in the ‘Plea at Crown Court’ field number of defendants that entered a plea overall (where plea was known)
  • The number of BAME defendants can be defined by combining ’02: Black’, ’03: Asian’, ’04: Mixed’ and ’05: Chinese and other’ rows. The number of white defendants who entered a guilty plea each year can be found in the ‘01: White’ row.
  • The proportion of defendants who entered a guilty plea can be found by dividing the number of guilty pleas by the number of overall pleas for the relevant ethnicity rows.
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