Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to ensure that data collected by (a) his Department and (b) his Department’s associated arms-length bodies records biological sex as opposed to gender identity.

To provide a response Ministry of Justice officials would need to ascertain the facts in relation to all steps taken to ensure that data is recorded as biological sex in MoJ HQ and its 34 public bodies, which could only be done at disproportionate cost to the department.

The scope of this question covers MoJ and its 34 public bodies. All ALBs do not use the same systems to record biological sex information and it is not known what steps are taken in each ALB to ensure biological sex is recorded, as opposed to gender identity, because this information is not held centrally.

To reach a factual conclusion each ALB would need to be investigated to identify and extract all information pertaining to all steps taken to ensure that data collected records biological sex as opposed to gender identity across all records.

However, I can confirm that our policy concerning prisons is that transgender prisoners are allocated based on legal gender rather than self-declared gender identity. HMPPS also records the transgender status of every transgender prisoner, meaning that for each we know both their biological sex and their gender identity.