Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the effectiveness of existing data collection systems in capturing the scale of spiking incidents in the UK.

From April 2026, offences which involved spiking will be added to the Home Office’s Annual Data Requirement. This is the formal mechanism through which the Home Office collects data from all police forces in England and Wales. This will ensure that the Home Office has access to formal, standardised and regular reporting from the police on offences involving spiking.

The Home Office will also look to utilise the National Data Quality Improvement Service (NDQIS), a computer-assisted classification tool, to greatly improve the analysis of the data it receives. NDQIS will have a range of benefits including being able to identify crimes which were facilitated by spiking, such as rape or sexual assault. We expect this to give us a better understanding of the scale of spiking and its use in enabling other crimes.