Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people have been (a) prosecuted and (b) sentenced for grooming gang-related offences in their absence in the last 10 years.

The Ministry of Justice publishes data on the number of prosecutions and sentences for sexual and grooming related offences at criminal courts in England and Wales in the Outcomes by Offences data tool, which can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly: June 2024.

Data held centrally does not include if the defendant is prosecuted or sentenced in their absence. This information may be held in the court records but to examine individual court records would be of disproportionate costs.

Furthermore, information on whether defendants dealt with are part of ‘grooming gangs’ is not centrally identified in the criminal courts data systems relevant to this question. Therefore, it is not possible to provide the specific information requested.