Crimes of Violence: Remand in Custody

(asked on 18th August 2021) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of girls aged (a) 13 to 18 and (b) 19 to 21 who have been remanded in custody for offences related to (i) violence and (ii) gang related violence (A) in total and (B) by home local authority area in England since 2018.


Answered by
Alex Chalk Portrait
Alex Chalk
Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
This question was answered on 8th September 2021

The Government is committed to tackling crime and serious violence. The Beating Crime Plan was published in July and introduces bold new measures to drive down crime and tackle the underlying causes of repeat offending. The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill will protect the public by giving the police the tools needed to tackle crime and disorder, and by addressing the root causes of serious violent crime using multi-agency approaches to prevention.

The full information requested could only be obtained at disproportionate cost. This is because it would require manually searching case files. However, the questions can, in part, be answered by published statistics in the Criminal Justice Statistics annual report data tools.

The Ministry of Justice publishes court outcomes by offence, remand status, sex, age and several other characteristics. This information from 2010 to 2020 is available in Criminal Justice Statistics 2020 annual report here, see in the following data tools:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2020

  • Outcomes by offence data tool
  • Remands: Magistrates’ court data tool
  • Remands: Crown Court data tool

For example:

40742 - 40743: in the Remands: Magistrates’ court tool, filter on ‘age range’, ‘sex’ and ‘offence group’.

40744 – 40745: in the Outcomes by offence data tool, filter on ‘age range’, ‘sex’ and ‘offence group’.

Note that offences are recorded under the specific offence recorded in law, so while violence is an offence group, gang-related violence is not centrally held in the court proceedings database and could only be obtained by manually searching court records at disproportionate costs. The same applies for address/local authority of defendants.

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