§ Lord James Douglas-Hamiltonasked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he will lay before Parliament a consolidated and classified extract of statistics collected under section 47 of the Police (Scotland) Act 1967 for the years since 1979.
§ Mr. Younger"Criminal Statistics, Scotland, 1980–82" (Cmnd. 9403) was laid before Parliament yesterday and will be published today. Certain information for these years has already been released in statistical bulletins, copies of which were sent to all Scottish Members, and placed in the Library at the time of issue. We have extended the range of data collected on appeals —the subject of one of the chapters of the volume—from that originally intended and this has deferred the publication. Delays of this nature should not recur in future since I propose a change in the arrangements for publication of criminal statistics for the years 1983 onwards. I propose to meet the requirements of the 1967 Act by laying before Parliament a simple abstract drawn from the data collected from Scottish police forces. At the same time, the range of topics covered by my Department's statistical bulletins will be extended to cover the data hitherto presented in the annual publication which will no longer be produced in its present form. This change will bring current statistics to public notice much more quickly, while maintaining all the existing statistical series.