North Wales prosecutions ceased - no evidence offered

Request 

Please can you confirm for me the total number of criminal charges dealt with in the North Wales area which have been withdrawn due to no evidence being offered?

If so, can I please have the annual total of such instances for the following years? 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023 to date?

Response

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does collate limited data within the scope of your request, namely data showing the number of defendants where the prosecution was ceased due to no evidence being offered, rather than ‘total number of criminal charges’.

Please see the table below showing such data where the originating police force was North Wales. The data provided is for each calendar year up to the end of September 2022 in line with our published data policy. Please refer to the caveats published underneath the table when considering the disclosed data.

The data reported in the table above show the proceedings that originated in the stated Police Force. This does not necessarily indicate that a prosecution was commenced or completed in the geographical area covered by that Force or the corresponding CPS Area due to cross border transfer of cases.

The counting unit for CPS records is the defendant in a case, as opposed to the number of offences, or the number of cases. Thus, if a single set of proceedings involves more than one defendant, then each defendant is counted, and the outcome is recorded for each defendant.

Completed prosecution outcomes comprise convictions (guilty pleas, convictions after trial and cases proved in the absence of the defendant) and non-conviction outcomes (prosecutions dropped by the CPS, discharges, acquittals after trial and administrative finalisations).

Offered no evidence: The prosecution drops proceedings before evidence is heard. Included are cases in which no evidence is offered because the prosecution accepts a bind over.

CPS data are available through its Case Management System (CMS) and associated Management Information System (MIS). The CPS collects data to assist in the effective management of its prosecution functions. The CPS does not collect data that constitutes official statistics as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

These data have been drawn from the CPS’s administrative IT system, which (as with any large scale recording system) is subject to possible errors with data entry and processing. The figures are provisional and subject to change as more information is recorded by the CPS. We are committed to improving the quality of our data and from mid-June 2015 introduced a new data assurance regime which may explain some unexpected variance in some future data sets.

The official statistics relating to crime and policing are maintained by the Home Office (HO) and the official statistics relating to sentencing, criminal court proceedings, offenders brought to justice, the courts and the judiciary are maintained by the Ministry of Justice (MOJ).