Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many adults aged 18 and over have been tried in the adult court for an offence committed while aged under 18 in each of the last 18 months.

Data set out in the table below shows the number of defendants aged under 18 at the point of committing an offence and age 18 or over at the point of completion who were dealt with in 'for trial' cases at the Crown Court, England and Wales in the period from January 2020 - June 2021 (latest available) (see notes 1-6).

Notes

1) Excludes a small number of cases with identified data quality issues (e.g. no date information recorded), breaches and appeals. On average across the series present 8% of defendants do not have a recorded age at offence and as such are excluded from this analysis.

2) Includes all criminal cases which have received a verdict and concluded in the specified time period in the Crown Court.

3) Only one offence is counted for each defendant in the case. If there is more than one offence per defendant that complete on the same day, a set of validation rules applies to select one offence only and these relate to the longest duration, seriousness and the lowest sequence number of the offence.

4) Data link using probabilistic recording linking ('Splink') methodology - further information of the matching methodology is available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/joined-up-data-in-government-the-future-of-data-linking-methods/splink-mojs-open-source-library-for-probabilistic-record-linkage-at-scale

5) The number of defendants shows the number whose cases have completed and where it has been possible to match from initial appearance at magistrates’ court to completion in the Crown Court. The match rate is typically between 90-95%, as for some cases, it is not possible to match defendants through the system and these cases are excluded.

6) Estimates from Q3 2020 exclude cases which have transitioned to the Common Platform system in the early adopter sites from September 2020, this represents 1.6% of all disposals in the latest reporting period.

Source: Criminal Court Statistics, Data and Evidence as a Service - Courts and People (PQ 58392)