§ Mr. MichaelTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will restore the practice of publishing quarterly detailed figures for recorded crime in England and Wales and in each police force area as soon as such figures can be compiled by his Department.
§ Mr. MacleanI have no plans to revert to quarterly publication of recorded crime statistics.
§ Mr. MichaelTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department on what sources of information he relies for an assessment of intensity or persistence of law-breaking with regard to the age and sex of offenders compared with the generality of the population; and if he will publish such of it as is not already published.
§ Mr. MacleanThe main source of official statistics on criminal careers is the offenders index, a database containing information on all serious convictions in England and Wales from 1963 to 1992. Studies carried out using the offenders index include cohort studies which enable estimates to be made of the percentage of the population with serious convictions at different ages and by sex. Periodically, the offenders index is supplemented with information on cautioning collected from police forces. Information on the offenders index and studies carried out using it is contained in "The Offender; Tale: Janus Studies", a copy of which is available in the Library. The results of cohort and other analyses based upon the offenders index are published regularly and will continue to be so.
A detailed analysis carried out by the Home Office research and planning unit of criminal careers, including involvement in offending, frequency of offending and factors associated with persistance and desistance analysis, was published last year.
Analysing Offending: data, models and interpretations", by Roger Tarling, published by HMSO.