Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the statistics published by her Department entitled Police powers and procedures, published on 17 November 2022, if she will make it her policy to require the collection of specific offences currently identified as non-notifiable offences for which children are detained in police custody.

The collection and publication of this data will bring additional transparency and accountability to police custody in England and Wales and help us better understand how and why police powers and procedures are used within the custody process. We intend to build on this by working with police forces and the NPCC to improve data quality in future years.

The police custody data collection became mandatory for 2022/23. We will continue to keep the scope of the data we request from forces under review. All data collections and new requests are reviewed each year by the Policing Data Requirement Group (PDRG) to ensure that data requested from the police is proportionate to the need for the data and that forces have the technical capabilities to provide the data requested.