Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many adults were convicted of offences involving the online grooming of children in 2018.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The Ministry of Justice publishes statistics on proceedings and outcomes for a range of offences relating to grooming, including where an adult meets or attempts to meet a child aged under 16 following grooming and causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity. Offences relating to online grooming are not distinguished from all grooming offences in court data, can be found under offence code 88a at the link below.
Data on these offences is published up to December 2017 and available in the Principal offence proceedings and outcomes by Home Office offence code data tool: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/738814/HO-Code-Tool-2017.xlsx.
Statistics for 2018 will be published on 16 May 2019.
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many Category C Prisons there are in England and Wales; and how many of those prisons routinely accommodated prisoners of a higher risk category in 2018.
Answered by Rory Stewart
In 2018 there were 43 predominant category C training prisons in England and Wales. All prisoners are individually assessed as to their risk of escape or abscond, their risk of harm to the public should they escape or abscond and their risk to the good order of the establishment. This ensures categorisation of prisoners to a prison providing an appropriate level of security. Only those prisoners categorised as C would be held in a category C prison. If after reassessment a category C prisoner is required to transfer to a category B prison they are usually held in a segregation unit pending transfer to a suitable category B establishment.
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 6 December 2018 to Question 198197 on Television: Licensing, what estimate he has made of the number of people who have been given custodial sentences for failure to pay fines levied for non-payment of the BBC licence fee in each of the last three years.
Answered by Rory Stewart
The number of people who have been committed to prison for failure to pay fines imposed for non-payment of the BBC licence fee in each of the last three years can be viewed in the table.
Table 1: Sentenced prison admissions for non-payment of the fine associated with using a TV without a licence, by sex; 2015 to 2017 |
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| 2015 | 2016 | 2017 |
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Total | 38 | 29 | 19 |
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Of which: |
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Female | 20 | 12 | 8 |
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Male | 18 | 17 | 11 |
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Data sources and quality |
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The figures in this table have been drawn from administrative IT systems which, as with any large scale recording system, are subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. |
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Source: PQ 211130 (Ministry of Justice; ASD-JSAS) |
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Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many (a) searches for and (b) discoveries of drugs there have been in prisons in each of the last three years.
Answered by Rory Stewart
The misuse of drugs in prison drives violence, vulnerability and crime and so tackling this is one of our top priorities. Consequently, we are improving our security to restrict the availability of drugs. We use body, property, cell and area searches, metal-detecting scanners and drug and phone detection dogs across the estate. We are investing £6 million to tackle drug supply and reduce demand in 10 of the most challenging prisons, with body scanners and more staff focused on effective searching.
The Ministry of Justice does not record the number of searches conducted in each prison. Data and information on drug finds is routinely published as part of the normal publication schedule
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-hm-prison-and-probation-service-digest-2017-to-2018
Data on drug finds in 2018-19 will be published in due course in line with the normal publication schedule.
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of people over the age of 70 that have not made a will.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
The Secretary of State for Justice has made no estimate. Individuals are not required to notify any third party that they have made a will and there is no central record of whether individuals have left a valid will when they die.
The Government provides advice on making a will on the Gov.UK website – www.gov.uk/make-will.
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of (a) confiscated drones and (b) persons prosecuted for the illegal use of a drone in the vicinity of a prison in the last two years.
Answered by Rory Stewart
We are taking decisive steps to tackle the use of drones as a supply route for organised criminals to bring illicit items such as drugs and mobile phones into prisons. These drone operators can be prosecuted for offences related to conveyance of items into prison under the Prison Act 1952. Last year we launched Operation Trenton, a specialist team of police and Prison Service investigators, to work together to intercept drones and track down the criminals behind them.
In 2016, 92 drones were recovered. In 2017, 73 were recovered.
In respect of persons prosecuted for the illegal use of a drone in the vicinity of a prison in the last two years, we do not hold this data centrally. However, we believe that at least 45 people have been convicted of illicit drone activity, with those sentenced serving a total of more than 140 years in prison. On 26 October 2018, following the largest investigation of its kind, an organised criminal gang of 15 were collectively sentenced to nearly 40 years in prison for using drones to drop drugs into a number of prisons. The ringleader received a sentence of 10 years, the highest single sentence for drone-related activity to date.
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been convicted for selling e-cigarettes to people aged under 18 in the last three years.
Answered by Lucy Frazer - Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport
Zero persons were proceeded against for sales of e-cigarettes to under 18s in England and Wales between 2015 and 2017 (most recent figures available).
This information was obtained from a manual review of court case files that centrally held data indicated may be relevant, and as such has not been through the same quality assurance processes as for routinely published data.
These figures relate to persons for whom these offences were the principal offences for which they were dealt with. When a defendant has been found guilty of two or more offences the principle offence is the offence for which the heaviest penalty is imposed. Where the same disposal is imposed for two or more offences, the offence selected is the offence for which the statutory maximum penalty is the most severe.
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate his Department has made of the number of custodial sentences given for non-payment of the BBC licence fee in each of the last three years.
Answered by Rory Stewart
The maximum penalty for television license fee evasion is a Level 3 fine, so a custodial sentence may not be imposed for this offence. In 2017 fines accounted for 99.5% of sentencing outcomes for television license fee evasion.
Where offenders fail to pay fines, the courts have a range of enforcement powers, including, in the last resort, imprisonment of the offender.
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many times Her Majesty's Prisons Inspectorates of England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland met in 2017.
Answered by Rory Stewart
The three Inspectorates are members of the National Preventive Mechanism (NPM) and as such participated in two NPM business meetings in 2017.
In addition, the Chief Inspector for England & Wales and the Chief Inspector for Scotland were part of a NPM Steering Group which met on three occasions in 2017. On a fourth occasion, membership included the Chief Inspector for England & Wales and a member of the Criminal Justice Inspectorate for Northern Ireland (CJINI).
Asked by: Gregory Campbell (Democratic Unionist Party - East Londonderry)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people served a sentence of imprisonment for convictions under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 in each of the last three years.
Answered by Rory Stewart
The number of offenders sentenced to immediate custody for offences under the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, in England and Wales from 2015 to 2017 (the latest currently available data), can be obtained from the ‘Experimental Statistics: Principal Offence proceedings and outcomes by Home Office offence code data tool’ in the annual criminal justice statistics publication, linked below. Select the below offence codes from the ‘offence code’ drop down box:
821 Owner or person in charge allowing dog to be dangerously out of control in a public place injuring any person
822 Owner or person in charge allowing dog to enter a non-public place and injure any person
11112 Breeding or breeding from a fighting dog
11113 Selling, exchanging, offering, advertising or exposing for sale a fighting dog
11114 Giving or offering to give a fighting dog or dangerous dog
11115 Allowing a fighting dog to be in a public place without a muzzle or a lead
11116 Abandoning, or allowing to stray, a fighting dog
11117 Possess or have custody of a fighting dog
11118 Owner or person in charge allowing dog to be dangerously out of control in a public place, without injury being caused
11119 Owner or person in charge allowing dog to enter a non- public place causing reasonable apprehension of injury to a person
11125 Owner / person in charge of a dog dangerously out of control - no injury
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2017