Further to the written statement of my hon. Friend Fiona McTaggart, then the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, on 30 March 2006, Hansard, column 89WS, announcing the publication of the 2005 race and criminal justice statistics, the statistics were temporarily withdrawn from the public domain following the emergence of inaccuracies relating to the racist incidents data. The Home Office has been working closely with Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to verify the statistics and checking is now complete. The statistics have been published today with some amendments in relation to the racist incidents and stop and search data. We regret any confusion resulting from the need to withdraw temporarily the statistics from the public domain.

The Government are committed to ensuring our statistics provide an accurate picture of black and minority ethnic groups' experiences of the criminal justice system and has been working to prevent future problems and improve the consistency and robustness of the data we collect. We will shortly be publishing a major review of the race and criminal justice statistics and our response, which will set out our programme of work to improve data we collect on black and minority ethnic groups' experiences of the criminal justice system.