Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of standardising the legal definition of criminal child exploitation for the purposes of having consistent national statistics on criminal child exploitation.

This Government is committed to tackling child criminal exploitation (CCE) and going after the gangs who are luring children into violence and crime. Data from the Department for Education's Children in Need statistics allow us to estimate there were around 14,500 children that have been identified as at risk or involved in child criminal exploitation in 23/24.

We are delivering on our manifesto commitment to introduce a new offence of child criminal exploitation which was included in the Crime and Policing Bill. The offence will define CCE (in terms of its constituent elements) for the purpose of prosecuting offenders under this offence. A specific new CCE offence will also more clearly identify the volumes of victims and perpetrators of CCE, thus helping to improve the overall data available on this issue.

As part of the CCE offence we will be taking a power for the Secretary of State to issue statutory guidance. We intend for this to also provide guidance on the definition of CCE, including illustrative examples of common forms and methods of CCE.