Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of sentences handed down by (a) Magistrates' Courts and (b) Crown Courts were suspended prison sentences in each of the last 5 years.

Information up to December 2018 on the number and proportion of suspended sentences imposed in England and Wales, broken down by court type, has been published in the ‘Sentencing data tool’ at: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2018.

To obtain the information requested, in the Pivot Table Fields:

• Remove ‘Offence Type’ from the rows field and replace with ‘Courts’.

• Drag the ‘Sentence Outcome’ variable into the rows field (beneath ‘Courts’).

The number of suspended sentences imposed at a specified court in a specified year will then be shown in the table. The proportion for each court can be calculated by dividing the number of suspended sentences imposed at a specified court in a specified year by the total number of sentences imposed at such a specified court in a specified year.