Recommendation 17

We also asked about the impact of the pandemic on black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals, particularly given that the Department has faced difficulties collecting and analysing data on ethnicity in the past. Since the Lammy review in 2017 into the experiences of ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system, the Department said that while it had made significant improvements in standardising the ethnicity data collected across the system, there are still large gaps and it does not have the data it needs to know the true impact of the pandemic. The Department said it is working to improve how it measures and evaluates the impact, although HMCTS said that its recent work has been focused on civil and family courts and tribunals rather than criminal courts. On remote hearings, HMCTS said it did collect data on ethnicity in its evaluation and found no significant variation in experiences between different ethnic groups.28 Rape and serious sexual offences