§ 94. Mr. C. Osborneasked the Secretary of State for the Home Department how many murders are known to the police for 1960, including those of manslaughter which have been excluded from the category of murder cases by the the Homicide Act, 1957; and what were the strictly comparable figures of each of the previous nine years, respectively.
§ Mr. R. A. ButlerThe numbers of murders known to the police in each of the calendar years 1951 to 1959 were given in reply to a Question by my hon. Friend on 15th December, 1960. The provisional figure for the number of murders known to the police in 1960 is 152. Twenty other offences originally recorded as murder by the police in 1960 were reduced to manslaughter in the same year under Section 2 or Section 4 of the Homicide Act, 1957, and the corresponding figures for 1957, 1958 and 1959 were 16, 21 and 16 respectively; it cannot be assumed, however, that all these offences would necessarily have been dealt with as murder but for the operation of the Act.