Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the Answer of 25 April 2017 to Question 71424, whether she has assessed the potential merits of linking data on arrests to prosecution and conviction data.

The Home Office reviews the data it collects from the police under the Annual Data Requirement on an annual basis, balancing demands for data with the burden of collecting data on the police.

The Home Office is presently working with police forces in England and Wales to implement a record level data collection for police recorded crime. This will allow us to investigate linking between the police recorded crime data held by the Home Office and the prosecution and conviction data held by the Ministry of Justice in order to create a richer dataset for analysis.

The arrests data that the Home Office collects from police forces is at the aggregate level rather than record level. Collecting record level data from the police for arrests would result in considerable additional burden on the police and is not currently planned.