Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many times police forces used stop and search powers in each of the last 12 months; and what the (a) ethnicity and (b) gender was of each of those people who were stopped and searched.

The Home Office collects and publishes statistics on the number of stop and searches, conducted by each police force in England and Wales, on an annual basis.

Data are published in the ‘Police Powers and Procedures, England and Wales’ statistical bulletin, the latest of which cover the twelve months to March 2019:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-powers-and-procedures-england-and-wales-year-ending-31-march-2019

However, stop and search data collected and published for this release does not contain information on the month in which the search took place, nor on the gender of the person stopped and searched.

Data on stop and search are also published on the police.uk website, where further breakdowns, including the date of the search and the gender of the person being searched, are available. Data up to August 2019 are available here: https://data.police.uk/data/

However, the police.uk data do not form part of the National Statistics published by the Home Office. There are known issues with the data including for location accuracy, Court Results matching, and matching outcomes. Full details are available at https://data.police.uk/about/#quality. Data on the police.uk website is a snapshot in time at the end of a particular month and should be treated with caution.