Criminal justice system statistics quarterly: December 2020
Trends in the use of out of court disposals, defendants prosecuted, offenders convicted, remand and sentencing decisions, and offender histories in England and Wales.
Applies to England and Wales
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This report presents key statistics on activity in the criminal justice system for England and Wales. It provides information up to the year ending December 2020 with accompanying commentary, analysis and presentation of longer-term trends.
We continue to review our data gathering, access and release practices during the pandemic, focusing efforts on priority analysis and statistics. Our statement explains this further. Of particular note, we temporarily paused access to the Police National Computer earlier this year, to minimise non-essential travel by our analysts. Whilst access has now resumed, work is being resumed on a priority basis. As a result, and in line with guidance from the Office for Statistics Regulation, the decision has been made to delay the publishing of cautions data and the offending histories chapter of this publication. We will keep users updated of any further changes via our published release calendar.
Statistician’s comment:
The figures published today highlight the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on criminal court prosecutions and outcomes over the last year. Latest short-term trends are mostly reflective of the impact of the pandemic on court processes and prioritisation rather than a continuation of the longer-term series.
The monthly data shows that following the sharp falls in overall prosecutions and convictions immediately following the March 2020 ‘lockdown’, these have since recovered, although not quite to pre-pandemic levels. Indictable offences have recovered faster than summary offences, reflecting the prioritisation of cases that were likely to result in a custodial sentence, this has also led to an increase in the proportion of defendants remanded in custody.
The custody rate increased in the latest year due to a higher proportion of indictable offences dealt with in court since April 2020, while the overall average custodial sentence length remained stable compared to 2019.