Question to the Attorney General:

To ask Her Majesty's Government how many prosecutions of brothel owners or managers are (1) pending, and (2) completed, following the removal of women from their premises to Yarl's Wood and other detention centres.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not maintain a central record of the number of prosecutions of defendants charged with offences of keeping a brothel or of controlling prostitution. This information could only be obtained by a manual examination of CPS case files, which would incur disproportionate cost.

While the CPS does not collect data on defendants prosecuted by specific offence or the outcome of any prosecution, information is available for the number of offences concerning the keeping or management of brothels and controlling prostitution, in which a prosecution commenced at magistrates’ courts. The table below shows the number of these offences recorded on the CPS’s Case Management System in each financial year over the last ten years.

It should be noted that the figures relate to the number of offences and not the number of individual defendants. It is often the case that an individual defendant is charged with more than one offence against the same victim.