Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if her Department will provide sentencing data by (a) ethnicity and (b) nationality to the hon. Member for Great Yarmouth's private inquiry into grooming gangs.

The Ministry of Justice publishes data on the number of offenders sentenced, which can be filtered to specific offences and broken down by defendant ethnicity. This can be obtained in the Outcomes by Offences data tool, which can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: Criminal Justice Statistics.

However, data held centrally does not include an offender’s nationality. This information may be held on court records but to examine individual court records would be of disproportionate cost.

Data held centrally includes details of sexual grooming offences but does not identify if this was gang related. Gang related sexual grooming offences are not identifiable separately as there is no single offence code to specifically cover offences related to gangs.