Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people were serving a sentence for sexual offences against a child in England and Wales in each of the last five years.
We have provided information for the past 4 years of the number of people serving a prison sentence for a sexual offence against a child. To provide equivalent data for 30 June 2014 would entail disproportionate cost. This is due to an improvement made in 2015 where Child Sexual Abuse offences were specifically differentiated within our offence information.
30th June 2015 - 7,404
30th June 2016 - 8,376
30th June 2017 - 8,965
30th June 2018 - 9,167
The figures given have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing.