Source · Select Committees · Justice Committee
Recommendation 28
28
Accepted in Part
Publish comprehensive quarterly data on remanded defendants, including bail refusals and demographics.
Recommendation
It is only on the basis of good quality data in respect of the use of custodial remand that there can be effective policy-making. More data needs to be collected and published on remanded defendants, particularly in relation to the reasons for refusing bail, the length of time people are spending on remand as well as demographic information, including vulnerabilities and protected characteristics amongst the remand population, to increase transparency and improve the information available to decision-makers. We recommend that the Ministry of Justice begins to collate, where it does not do so already, and publish data on the remanded population in a dedicated quarterly publication, as it does for the current Offender Management Statistics. We also welcome the current work being conducted by the Centre for Public Data on data gaps in the justice system. The issue of data is one that we routinely raise in our reports, and so we call on the Government to give urgent consideration to the Centre’s recommendations and conclusions when they are published later this year. (Paragraph 155) 48 The role of adult custodial remand in the criminal justice system
Government Response Summary
The government partially accepts the recommendation, rejecting a new dedicated quarterly publication for remand data but committing to improving existing publications. They will add a new table on remand prison population by ethnicity to the Offender Management Statistics and will consider the Centre for Public Data's recommendations when published.
Government Response
Accepted in Part
HM Government
Accepted in Part
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.