Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the cost has been to the public purse of maintaining the Sex Offenders' Register in every year since its inception.

A system which maintains a database which holds records of those required to register with the police under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 (the 2003 Act), those jailed for more than 12 months for violent offences, and those thought to be at risk of offending was rolled out to police forces in England & Wales during 2004 and 2005. The costs of running & maintaining the system for the period 2017 to 2022 are shown below. To retrieve the data from 2003 to 2017, this could only be obtained at disproportionate cost and hence is not available here.

From Financial year 2017/2018 to Financial Year 2021/22 the overall cost has been £9,601,852.

The costs below for the system include the budgeted OH charge in the Run cost and the split of staff costs.

*Due to the limited data available in regard to pay cost in these FYs, budgets pay costs have been used.