Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been (a) charged and (b) prosecuted for alleged criminal offences involving the abuse of hedgehogs in each of the last five years.

The Home Office collects and publishes information about notifiable crimes and their investigative outcomes from the police in England and Wales. This includes Wildlife offences but those involving the abuse of hedgehogs are not separately identifiable in the data we hold centrally.

Information on the number of prosecutions for such offences is published by the Ministry of Justice and can be found in their Outcomes by Offence Data tool here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2022

This information will also only be available at offence level, and it will not separately identify offences involving the abuse of hedgehogs.