Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of pre-charge bail applications in child sexual abuse investigations were successful in each of the last five years.

The Home Office does not centrally hold the information requested.

From April 2017 the Home Office requested information on a voluntary basis from police forces on the number of individuals released on pre-charge bail following arrest, broken down by bail length.

This data collection has been published (as an Annex) within the ‘Police powers and procedures, England and Wales’ statistical bulletin, based on data received from 17 forces for the 2017/18 financial period. These figures give an indicative picture only and should be treated with caution – they have been designated as ‘Experimental Statistics’, to acknowledge further development will take place in the future. These can be accessed here:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-powers-and-procedures-england-and-wales-year-ending-31-march-2018

Data on the number of individuals released on pre-charge bail following arrest, broken down by bail length, were requested on a mandatory basis from April 2018, which will be published in the next instalment of the ‘Police powers and procedures, England and Wales’ statistical bulletin, scheduled for release in Autumn 2019.

Information on the number/proportion of persons released on pre-charge bail with restrictions are not collected, nor are information on specific details of pre-charge bail restrictions, and these will not be covered in the statistics.