Fraud: Prosecutions
(asked on 12th July 2023) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what data his Department holds on the percentage of fraud cases which did not proceed due to a victim or witness no longer supporting the case for prosecution on the day of trial in each year since 2010.
The percentage of cases where prosecution offers no evidence because the victim or witness no longer supports prosecution for theft, fraud, robbery and possession of weapons offence can be found in the below table.
The table details the cases in which the victim or witness no longer supports prosecution on the day of trial (%) by selected offence group, England and Wales, 2014-2023 (data for 2023 covers only the period from January to March, the latest available).
Year | All offences | Robbery | Theft offences | Possession of weapons | Fraud offences |
2014 | 2.1% | 3.1% | 2.0% | 3.8% | 0.5% |
2015 | 1.8% | 3.1% | 2.1% | 2.6% | 0.5% |
2016 | 1.9% | 3.4% | 2.6% | 2.9% | 0.5% |
2017 | 2.0% | 3.8% | 2.3% | 3.2% | 1.0% |
2018 | 1.9% | 3.3% | 2.0% | 3.2% | 0.4% |
2019 | 1.9% | 2.8% | 2.1% | 3.0% | 0.4% |
2020 | 1.7% | 2.5% | 2.4% | 2.5% | 1.0% |
2021 | 1.5% | 3.1% | 2.5% | 1.8% | 0.7% |
2022 | 1.4% | 3.0% | 2.4% | 1.4% | 0.2% |
2023 | 1.5% | 3.7% | 2.4% | 2.1% | 0.7% |
The data presented covers trials which do not go ahead on the listed trial data as the "prosecution offers no evidence because the witness/victim no longer supports prosecution". This is measured as a proportion of all listed trials in that period, excluding trial vacations.
The data is first published as part of the National Statistics series ‘Criminal Court Statistics Quarterly’, latest data available to March 2023. The data is only available from 2014 onwards.