Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate his Department has made of the number of children below the minimum age of criminal responsibility who were involved in county lines activity in (a) 2015, (b) 2016 and (c) 2017.

We do not have specific information about children under 10 years of age involved in county lines. However, the Home Office has commissioned regular threat assessments of county lines by the National Crime Agency, which provide the most detailed and reliable intelligence on the scale and nature of county lines.

The threat assessments do not contain estimates of the number of children involved due to data limitations but they report that the threat has grown. The NCA is currently preparing a new threat assessment for publication shortly.