Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she plans to (a) expand and (b) refine the categories of sexual offences used in police recorded crime data for monitoring (i) the nature of offences committed and (ii) trends in sexual offences data in England and Wales.

The police recorded crime collection is primarily an offence-based series in which crimes are recorded by the police in England and Wales based on the criminal offence that has been committed.

To respond to user needs, sub-categories have been created such as providing a breakdown of the age and sex of victims of rape, and qualifiers to indicate if the crime was related to child sexual abuse or exploitation or was committed online. These provide more insight on the nature of such offences and the Home Office continually reviews the presentation of its official statistics to ensure they meet user needs.

In the recently published VAWG Strategy the government committed to improving the quality and availability of data which will include data collected by the police on sexual offences.

Data on sexual offences recorded by the police in England and Wales are published by the Office for National Statistics and trends from 2002/03 can be found in table A5a here:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables