Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what proportion of the population of England and Wales has a criminal record.

To answer the question exactly would be disproportionate costs. The Ministry of Justice holds an extract of data from the Police National Computer (PNC). To obtain data on all those with a criminal record would require collaborating with the Home Office as they hold the complete source data.

In October 2024, the Ministry of Justice published an ad-hoc statistical publication which estimated that 9.4 million working age people in the UK have a nominal record with a criminal element against their name held on the MoJ extract of the PNC. This is a high-level estimate based on the UK population and is equivalent to 22% of the working aged population (those aged 16-64). This is an estimate with limitations. A comprehensive programme of work would need to be undertaken to determine a precise figure and this would incur disproportionate cost.