Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been prosecuted under the Poisons Act 1972 in each year since 2015.

As well as direct and tailored advice offered to individual businesses, the Home Office has published guidance for suppliers to assist them in their legal obligations in respect of poisons and explosive precursors. This includes advice on how to sell licensed products online, how to secure their chemicals, and advice on how to verify the professional or trade status of a prospective customer. The latter is not made available publicly as some of the detail may assist individuals in evading control measures.

The Home Office has a team of embedded police officers to engage with companies and provide advice. The team also assess controls, including through test purchases, to check the robustness of the regime. Where problems are found the team engage and seek to improve compliance.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not maintain a central record of the number of prosecutions of defendants charged with offences under the Poisons Act 1972. This information could only be obtained by a manual examination of CPS case files, which would incur disproportionate cost.

While the CPS does not collect data on defendants prosecuted by specific offence or the outcome of any prosecution, information is available for the number of offences under the Act in which a prosecution commenced at magistrates’ courts.

The table below shows the number of these offences recorded on the CPS’s Case Management System in each financial year over the last ten years.

It should be noted that the figures relate to the number of offences and not the number of individual defendants. It is often the case that an individual defendant is charged with more than one offence against the same victim.