Arrests

(asked on 1st December 2021) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is the longest time an individual has been under arrest on suspicion of an offence before being charged with that offence.


Answered by
Baroness Williams of Trafford Portrait
Baroness Williams of Trafford
Captain of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms (HM Household) (Chief Whip, House of Lords)
This question was answered on 15th December 2021

The Home Office does not collect data on the length of time individuals are under arrest before being charged with an offence.

However, the Home Office collects and publishes Experimental Statistics on durations of pre-charge bail and released under investigation, albeit from a subset of forces. These data are published as part of the ‘Police Powers and Procedures’ statistical collection (available on gov.uk).

The published statistics include data on the duration individuals have been on pre-charge bail or released under investigation, as well as the outcome assigned to individuals on pre-charge bail and released under investigation.

The year ending March 2021 is the first year that the Home Office has collected incident-level data for pre-charge bail and released under investigation, with almost all of the data requirement being collected on a voluntary basis. As such, not all forces have provided data, and the statistics are published as Experimental Statistics, which means that the quality of the data are still undergoing development. We are working with forces to make improvements for future publications.

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