Crown Prosecution Service
(asked on 16th November 2016) - View Source
Question to the Attorney General:
To ask the Attorney General, in what proportion of cases the Crown Prosecution Service used (a) in-house lawyers and (b) independent barristers in each year since 2010.
Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) cases are not prosecuted exclusively by in-house lawyers or independent barristers. Many cases are transferred between in-house and self-employed advocates. Therefore it is not possible to report on the proportion of cases prosecuted solely by one type of advocate or the other.
The CPS does record the proportion of work undertaken across the 13 CPS Areas in the Crown Court and High Court by in-house and self-employed advocates by value, in accordance with the prosecution fee schemes. Data for the last 6 years is contained in table 1.
TABLE 1 - Proportion of the work undertaken in the Crown Court by in-house and self-employed advocates by value | ||||
Financial Year | Estimated in-house advocate costs | Expenditure on external advocates | Proportion of in-house costs (%) | Proportion of external costs (%) |
2010-11 | 20,020,236 | 134,194,870 | 13.0% | 87.0% |
2011-12 | 20,787,591 | 111,041,044 | 13.5% | 84.2% |
2012-13 | 20,286,293 | 110,608,524 | 13.2% | 84.5% |
2013-14 | 21,759,812 | 114,606,542 | 14.1% | 84.0% |
2014-15 | 15,932,453 | 118,557,077 | 10.3% | 88.2% |
2015-16 | 14,953,333 | 132,024,999 | 9.7% | 89.8% |
Source: CIS Crown Advocacy & Finance modules
In the magistrates’ courts the CPS collects data on half-day court sessions conducted by in-house advocates (Associate Prosecutors, Crown Prosecutors and Senior Crown Prosecutors) and external advocates (Agents). Data for the last 6 years is contained in table 2.
TABLE 2 – The number of half-day court sessions conducted by in-house and external advocates | |||||
Financial Year | Lawyer Sessions | AP Sessions | AP2 Sessions | Agent Sessions | Covered by Agents % |
2010-11 | 198,798 | 103,626 | 4,358 | 33,033 | 9.7% |
2011-12 | 175,670 | 93,715 | 7,257 | 27,892 | 9.2% |
2012-13 | 132,932 | 76,515 | 8,181 | 55,703 | 20.4% |
2013-14 | 115,717 | 64,239 | 5,781 | 66,717 | 26.4% |
2014-15 | 104,098 | 57,450 | 4,030 | 63,295 | 27.7% |
2015-16 | 101,156 | 51,914 | 3,368 | 65,675 | 29.6% |
Source: CIS Manpower module