Data for magistrates’ courts non-convictions 2015 to 2023 (exceed statutory six month deadline)

Request

How many cases are not pursued due to exceeding the statutory six month deadline? Please provided data, year in year, from 2015 to the present date.

Response

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does collate data within the scope of your request.

In the first instance please note that we have interpreted your request as referring to prosecutions dropped because the offence has reached the statutory limit (either by way of abuse of process or out of time) in Magistrates’ courts.

Please find attached for your reference an Excel spreadsheet labelled ‘11743-DATA’ and note the caveats appended to the data therein. The Data in the table is provided from 2015 to the end of June 2023, in line with our publication policy.

In simple terms the data in the table shows the number of magistrates’ courts non-convictions allocated the following finalisation codes for the case not being pursued further:

• P61 - Delay between offence/charge or trial (applies before October 2018)
• P87 - Other charge/indictment; loss/harm minor from single incident; delay between offence/charge and trial (applies from October 2018).

It should also be noted that the list of reasons allocated to non-convictions changed during October 2018 and the two reasons above are not comparable but are provided by way of S.16 advice and assistance.