Prosecutions relating to Corporate Manslaughter

Request

I am emailing to request the number of prosecutions and successful convictions under the Corporate Manslaughter Act 2007 since it became law. Would it be possible to provide the annual number per year?

Response

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does hold some information falling within the scope of your request.

Please see the tabulated data below and note the caveats appended to the data when considering this disclosure. Please beware that a manual review of these case files has been undertaken to extract the data set provided.

We can only provide data back to 2011 due to CPS Central Casework Divisions transferring their caseload onto our Case Management System (CMS) and subsequently Management Information System (MIS). This ultimately means that any information held pre-dating this period would be archived and held as part of wider CPS area records, in an aggregated form with no offence or principal offence split. Any interrogation of this archived data is likely to attract the cost limit under section 12 of the FOIA.

Section 12(2) of the FOI Act means public authorities are not obliged to comply with a request for information if it estimates the cost of complying would exceed the appropriate limit.  The appropriate limit for central government is set at £600.  This means that the appropriate limit will be exceeded if it would require more than 24 hours' work in determining whether the CPS holds the information, and locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

We believe that the cost of undertaking searches for any pre 2011 prosecutions to ascertain the specific information you require (and even if recorded) would exceed the appropriate limit. Consequently, we are not obliged to comply with that part of your request.

General Data Caveats

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).    

Finally, under section 16 ‘advice and assistance’ of the FOI Act we have an obligation to advise what, if any, information may assist you with your request; as alluded to in caveat 3 above, you may find it helpful to refer your request to the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) who are the official statistics holder on conviction data. They can be contacted via email at: [email protected]