Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what proportion of magistrates' court sentences were fines in each of the last five financial years.

The Ministry of Justice publishes data on the number of prosecutions at criminal courts in England and Wales between 2010 and June 2024 in the Outcomes by Offences data tool, that can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: Criminal Justice Statistics Quarterly: June 2024.

For prosecutions from the Magistrates’ courts in England & Wales between 2010 and 2023, the Magistrates court tool can be downloaded from the Criminal Justice Statistics landing page here: Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: December 2023 - GOV.UK.

The data requested can be accessed by navigating to the ‘Sentence Outcomes’ tab and using the ‘Sentence outcome’ filter to select ‘Fine’ in both the Magistrates’ court tool and the Outcome by Offence tool.

Currently, in centrally collated sentencing data, it is only possible to identify cases recorded and processed on the Automated Track Case Management System as Single Justice Procedure (SJP) cases – this only reflects a portion of all SJP cases. There is work ongoing to improve this. Select the filter ‘SJP Flag’ to see number of these cases.