Correction to a Written Parliamentary Answer

Thursday 20th October 2022

(2 years, 2 months ago)

Written Statements
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Michael Ellis Portrait The Attorney General (Michael Ellis)
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On 23 June 2020, the Attorney General’s Office answered a written parliamentary question tabled by Richard Holden MP. The written answer included incorrect figures relating to the number of overall appeals, and successful appeals that the Department has made against unduly lenient sentences.

The question was:

“To ask the Attorney General, how many (a) appeals and (b) successful appeals the Government has made against sentences on the basis of undue leniency, in each of the last 20 years.” [61628]

The Departmental answer was:

The statistics from 2000 are provided below. It should be noted that Attorney General’s Office does not hold accurate data prior to 2001 and we are not in possession of the data indicating the number of successful appeals for the year 2000”.

However, checks on our data have revealed that some minor corrections need to be made. These corrections are included in square brackets below.

Year

Appeals the Government has made against sentences on the basis of undue leniency

Successful appeals the Government has made against sentences on the basis of undue

2000

31

Data unavailable

2001

147 [160]

90

2002

148 [135]

94 [92]

2003

96

78 [77]

2004

105 [136]

66 [85]

2005

108

67

2006

144

104

2007

76 [106]

53 [75]

2008

59 [71]

46 [51]

2009

84 [108]

58 [71]

2010

77 [78]

60

2011

117

94

2012

82

62

2013

70

61

2014

122

106

2015

136

102

2016

180 [190]

130 [141]

2017

173

137

2018

140

99

2019

97 [93]

63 [65]



Through this ministerial statement I am correcting this error, which arose out of the method used to collate the data. The Department now has more robust systems for collating and quality assuring the unduly lenient sentence data it publishes.

[HCWS331]