My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Mr Gerry Sutcliffe) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement.

Further to the Written Ministerial Statement of my honourable friend the then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Fiona Mactaggart), on 30 March 2006 (Official Report, col. 89WS) announcing the publication of the 2005 race and criminal justice statistics, the statistics were temporarily withdrawn from the public domain following the emergence of inaccuracies relating to the racist incidents data. The Home Office has been working closely with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) to verify the statistics, and checking is now complete. The statistics have been published today with some amendments in relation to the racist incidents and stop-and-search data. We regret any confusion resulting from the need to temporarily withdraw the statistics from the public domain.

The Government are committed to ensuring that our statistics provide an accurate picture of black and minority-ethnic groups' experiences of the criminal justice system and have been working to prevent future problems and improve the consistency and robustness of the data we collect. We will shortly be publishing a major review of the race and criminal justice statistics and our response, which will set out our programme of work to improve the data that we collect on black and minority-ethnic groups' experiences of the criminal justice system.