§ Lord Melchettasked Her Majesty's Government:
Why records of prosecutions relating to illegal methods of killing of seals at nets under licence according to the provisions of the Conservation of Seals Act 1970 are incomplete for England and Wales, and not available for Scotland for the period 1978–1982, and whether they will ensure that all chief constables submit such records in the future on a regular basis, and that an attempt be made to complete past records.
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Elton)Returns on prosecutions in England and Wales under the Conservation of Seals Act 1970 are collected as a part of the statistical system for reporting all criminal court proceedings, which involves 1½ million returns each year and covers790WA more than 2 million prosecutions. The collection of these data involves the identification, and clerical extraction, of information from court records and its subsequent recording in a separate statistical system and is of necessity subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale statistical system of this kind. Every reasonable effort is made to minimise these inaccuracies, but the information on proceedings under any individual Act may, or may not, be complete; it is more likely to be incomplete in respect of prosecutions brought other than by the police. The absence of any record of prosecutions brought under this Act in England and Wales in the period 1978–1982 should therefore be interpreted as indicating that if there were any such prosecutions their number was very small. It would involve disproportionate cost for each relevant police force to make an exhaustive search of its records in an attempt to produce a more precise figure. Prosecutions in Scotland under the 1970 Act are included in a category with other types of prosecution and cannot be separately identified.