Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he has taken to improve data collection on court proceedings involving defendants aged under 18 in youth courts, adult magistrates courts and Crown Courts since the start of the covid-19 outbreak; and what plans he has to publish disaggregated data on youth criminal cases.

HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) published Management Information during the COVID-19 outbreak to help explain how we delivered critical public services, from June 2020 to June 2021 found here https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/hmcts-weekly-management-information-during-coronavirus-outbreak. In July 2021, we paused publication of this information while we conducted a review. Following this review, we stopped publishing data on a weekly basis as this is included in the monthly published data found here HMCTS monthly management information.  Management information reflects the data held on the relevant case-management systems on the date of extraction, which is subject to change, and can differ from the quality-assured MOJ official statistics, which form the agreed definitive position. The published criminal court statistics can be found here Criminal court statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)

At present there are no plans to disaggregate youth data in the published statistics.