Prosecution and conviction statistics for Section 1 of the Dangerous Dogs Act (1991) from 1991 to 2023
Request
I require a summary of prosecution and conviction statistics for Section 1 of the Dangerous Dogs Act (1991), eg possession / breeding / advertisement of a prohibited breed. I would like the statistics by month and year going back to 1991 (or as far back as available) in any standard spreadsheet format to include the following columns:
Month and year, Number of prosecutions, number of convictions
I would also like a list of all other offenses charged simultaneously with each prosecution under the Dangerous dogs Act (1991), going back to 1991, if this information is available.
Date of prosecution, List of offenses charged
Response
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not centrally record the specific data that you have requested.
We do not hold defendant prosecution or conviction data by specific offence, and this includes the S1 of the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 offence. In order to answer your specific questions a manual review of all case files referred to in the disclosure provided ‘11563 DATA’ would be required and this would be at a disproportionate cost.
Section 12(1) 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.
As by way of assistance, the data that we have provided you confirms 4,468 offences were charged under Section 1 of the Dangerous Dogs Act 1991 equating to 3,282 cases. We believe that the cost of manually reviewing those case files (and in a narrowed time frame to that requested) to ascertain the specific information you require would exceed the appropriate limit. Consequently, we are not obliged to comply with this aspect of your request.
However, by way of S.16 advice and assistance I provide some limited data namely the number of offences, charged by way of S1 Dangerous Dogs Act 1991, which commenced prosecution at a magistrates’ court. This data is available from 2004 to the end of March 2023, and it should be noted that prior to 2004, CPS data was held in a separate database with no offence level breakdown.
I therefore attached an excel spreadsheet labelled ‘11563 DATA’. The table shows the number of offences by year and month and the caveats referred to therein should be noted when considering the disclosed information. Furthermore, any months missing from the table, are those where no offences have been recorded.
Finally, the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), are the official statistics holders of sentences imposed by the courts and they publish defendant data by specific offence, which may contain more detail than we can provide. You therefore may wish to submit a Freedom of Information request to them via the email address below: