Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been (a) prosecuted (b) found guilty (c) sentenced to prison for offences under the Assaults on Emergency Workers Act 2018 in (a) 2021 and (b) 2022, broken down by gender and ethnicity.

The Ministry of Justice publishes these figures on an annual basis on the GOV.UK website in the Magistrates' court data tool (MS Excel Spreadsheet, 17.1 MB) and the Crown Court data tool (MS Excel Spreadsheet, 8.42 MB) as part of the Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: December 2021 publication published in May 2022. However, in the course of ongoing modernisation of our data processing, we have identified an issue resulting in undercounting convictions for the offence in the Crown Court each year. This is highlighted in the ‘known issues’ tab of the above link and, as a result, the Crown Court data tool is missing 501 convictions in 2019, 1,149 in 2020 and 1,570 in 2021.

Therefore, the total number of defendants prosecuted for assaulting an emergency worker in England Wales in 2021 was 17,043, with 14,992 convictions in the same year.

The sentencing outcomes, ethnicities, and sex breakdowns for those convicted at Crown Court are affected by this processing issue and we are working to rectify this in time for our year to June data, published in November 2022.

Figures in the magistrates’ court data tool are not affected by the data processing issue – this includes prosecutions, convictions and sentencing at magistrates’ court as well as those sent for trial or committed for sentence at the Crown Court.