Emergency Calls: Hoaxes and False Alarms
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people were (a) prosecuted and (b) convicted for making hoax calls to the emergency services in each of the last five years.
Answered by Heidi Alexander
The Ministry of Justice publishes data on the number of defendants prosecuted and convicted, including for ‘Improper use of public electronic communications network’ which will include hoax calls. This can be obtained by using HO offence code 19607 in the Outcomes by Offences data tool, which can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2023.
However, it is not possible to identify only those offences that involved making hoax calls to the emergency services. This information may be held on court records but to examine individual court records would be of disproportionate costs.
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