Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: December 2024
Overview of trends in the use of out of court disposals, defendants prosecuted, offenders convicted, remand and sentencing decisions 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 2024 with accompanying commentary, analysis and presentation of longer-term trends.
Statistician’s comment
Continuing the recent trend, 2024 saw increases in the volumes of prosecutions and convictions at criminal courts. Prosecutions for theft presented the largest annual increase, followed by violence against the person and drugs offences. Prosecutions for sexual offences rose for the 6th consecutive year and represents a series high.
In the case of the more serious indictable offences, conviction levels are now at their highest since 2017.
The proportion of defendants dealt with for serious indictable offences who were remanded in custody continued to rise, with levels reaching a series peak in the magistrates’ courts.
Average custodial sentence length fell slightly for both indictable offences and all offences, driven in part by an increased proportion of conviction and custodial sentences being for theft offences which attract shorter sentence lengths but also a reduction in average sentences for some offence groups.
Crown Court data development (“One Crown”)
Recently MoJ and HMCTS worked together on the “One Crown” data project to create a single, consistent and flexible dataset that meets both MoJ and HMCTS needs. This is intended to bring greater transparency, clarity and coherence for all users of the Criminal Court Statistics series.
In the coming months we plan to move the Criminal Justice System statistics to the One Crown data model. Historically the two MoJ published series have been produced independently from distinct pipelines which is inefficient and risks undermining the transparency between the two publications. Moving to the same data model will improve the coherence and provide a clearer read across for users of the two CJS statistical series and our understanding of the underlying administrative systems.
Moving to the One Crown model will require a large amount of work in a short period of time. For this reason, we will be cancelling the planned publication of the CJS statistics to Q1 2025 in August 2025. We expect to bring forward the publication of CJS statistics by a month and publish Q2 2025 in October 2025 rather than November 2025. This change will be made to all subsequent releases and will ensure more timely release of CJS data.