Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been (a) charged and (b) prosecuted for heritage crimes in each year since 2010.

The Ministry of Justice publishes information on the number of defendants prosecuted for offences under the Salmon & Freshwater Fisheries Act 1975 (offence code 11606) between 2013 and 2021 across the following data tools:

• 2013-2016: Principal offence proceedings and outcomes by Home Office offence code data tool.
• 2017-2021: Outcomes by Offence data tool: December 2021.

The number of prosecutions for offences under the Salmon & Freshwater Fisheries Act 1975 between 2010 and 2012 has been provided in Table 1.

The Home Office collects information on charges for the number of offences under the Salmon & Freshwater Fisheries Act 1975. Data is available from April 2015 to September 2022 and has been provided in table 2. Charges are low as police recorded crime collection is largely restricted to indictable and triable either way offences and excludes those prosecuted by other authorities.

This is a subset of data (Wildlife crime) released in the quarterly Crime and Outcomes open data tables, available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-recorded-crime-open-data-tables

Heritage crime is not specifically defined in legislation as a criminal offence and therefore is not centrally recorded in the Court Proceedings Database held by the Ministry of Justice. To obtain information on whether an offence was related to heritage assets would involve a manual interrogation of court records which would result in disproportionate cost to the department. The Home Office does not collect data on the number of charges for this offence.

Offences that may be of interest include:

09408 - Executing or causing the demolition or alteration or an extension which affects the character of a listed building

09409 - Failure to comply with a Listed Building enforcement notice

09406 - Contravening tree preservation order