Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department collects on the practice of (a) handcuffing and (b) restraining children in the criminal justice system.

The Government is clear that the use of restraint on children needs to be proportionate and reasonable.

The Home Office publishes annual statistics on the use of force by police in England and Wales including a breakdown by age - https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/police-use-of-force-statistics.

Data on the use of force and restraint on children in the youth custodial estate is recorded and collated locally in incident reports at each custodial establishment and this is aggregated annually in the “Youth Justice Statistics” report - https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/youth-justice-statistics-2018-to-2019.

(current published data details incidents up to March 2019; the next data sets are due to be published in January 2021, for the period of April 2019 to March 2020).