Source · Select Committees · Justice Committee
Recommendation 25
25
Deferred
Expand bail accommodation offer, especially for women, and emphasise electronic tagging alternatives.
Recommendation
Bail accommodation is a particularly acute issue for women, with shortages of appropriate accommodation and that which is available often being far from home. The role of adult custodial remand in the criminal justice system 47 The Government should look at ways of expanding the accommodation offer and emphasise the use of alternatives such as electronic tagging if suitable accommodation is not available. (Paragraph 139) Data and technology
Government Response Summary
The government's response addresses the publication of remand data, committing to improve what they publish and include an additional ethnicity table by April 2023, but it does not address the core recommendation regarding expanding bail accommodation for women or emphasizing electronic tagging.
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
We partially accept this recommendation. The Ministry of Justice currently publishes prison remand data on a quarterly basis within Offender Management Statistics and court remand data within Criminal Justice Statistics and Criminal Court Statistics, with more detailed breakdowns provided in supplementary annual tables and in other publications specialising in equalities data. Isolating remand data in a new publication, separate from the context of other prison and court data, would make it harder for users to interpret or to explore trends across the justice system and could undermine the integrity of Official and National Statistics. Although we do not intend to introduce a new publication, we keep all our publications under review in line with the Code of Practice for Statistics and will look to improve what we are able to publish on remand in line with the code, and the clarity of the remand narrative, remaining mindful of the three key pillars of the Code of Practice: trustworthiness, quality and value. We will also include an additional table of the remand prison population by prisoner ethnicity as part of the next Offender Management Statistics, due for publication at the end of April 2023. We will continue to monitor and assess the quality, range and potential of the data in Common Platform, alongside other priorities for that data, particularly when a greater volume of case data becomes available. We await the views of the Centre for Public Data on areas for further consideration.