To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people who allegedly committed offences as children have been (a) tried and (b) sentenced as adults in each of the last five years.

We appreciate the impact that turning 18 can have on a defendant’s experience of the justice system, and that there will be occasions where a child crosses the age threshold before conviction (or acquittal) due to circumstances outside of their control. There are already safeguards in the system to prevent individuals in this position from being treated unfairly, including sentencing starting points based on age at offence and support for vulnerable defendants at adult court.

Data in the table below shows the number of defendants aged under 18 at the point of allegedly committing an offence and aged 18 or over at the point of completion who were dealt with at the Crown Court in England and Wales from January 2020 to June 2019. Individuals in this position can also be dealt with in the magistrates’ court, however quality-assured data for the numbers of such cases, or for previous years in either court, are not currently available.

Notes

1) Excludes a small number of cases with identified data quality issues (e.g. no date information recorded), breaches and appeals. On average across the series present 8% of defendants do not have a recorded age at offence and as such are excluded from this analysis.

2) Includes all criminal cases which have received a verdict and concluded in the specified time period in the Crown Court.

3) Only one offence is counted for each defendant in the case. If there is more than one offence per defendant that complete on the same day, a set of validation rules applies to select one offence only and these relate to the longest duration, seriousness and the lowest sequence number of the offence.

4) Data link using probabilistic recording linking ('Splink') methodology - further information of the matching methodology is available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/joined-up-data-in-government-the-future-of-data-linking-methods/splink-mojs-open-source-library-for-probabilistic-record-linkage-at-scale

5) The number of defendants shows the number whose cases have completed and where it has been possible to match from initial appearance at magistrates’ court to completion in the Crown Court. The match rate is typically between 90-95%, as for some cases, it is not possible to match defendants through the system and these cases are excluded.

6) Estimates from Q3 2020 exclude cases which have transitioned to the Common Platform system in the early adopter sites from September 2020, this represents 1.6% of all disposals in the latest reporting period.

Source: Criminal Court Statistics, Data and Evidence as a Service - Courts and People (PQ 58392)