Joan Ryan – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Joan Ryan on 2016-10-17.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to improve the quality and comparability of data on assaults on the police.

Brandon Lewis

We have worked closely with police forces in recent years to improve the quality of data on assaults on the police. In July 2015 provisional data were published for the first time since 2009/10, presenting data on assaults without injury from crime recording systems alongside information from health and safety systems to provide a more complete picture of assaults.

These data were then developed further in 2016, with forces asked to submit more complete data on assaults from their crime recording systems, including cases that involved injury as well as cases that did not. This allowed a more refined figure of 23,000 assaults on police officers in 2015/16 to be estimated.

We are continuing to work with forces to better capture assaults that involve injury to the police in recorded crime data.

Recorded crime data on “assaults without injury on a constable” are published at Community Safety Partnership (equivalent to boroughs in London) and Police Force Area level, and are available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-recorded-crime-open-data-tables

There are no current plans to collect this data at parliamentary constituency level.

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