Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to Lord Wolfson's oral evidence of 27 April 2021 to the Justice Committee, Q148, what plans the Government has to scrutinise non-CPS prosecutors given Lord Wolfson's observation that HMCTS had identified errors in 10 per cent of Covid Single Justice Procedure cases.

A review of Single Justice Procedure (SJP) cases dealt with between 1st September and 30th October 2020 showed that legal advisers and justices identified errors in 10% of cases. The errors are not caused by the type of proceedings; work done over the summer of 2020 suggested that the primary cause was the volume of regulations and the constant amendments, combined with the speed of introduction and the conditions in which officers issuing fixed penalty notices had to work. In the autumn of 2020, work was done with police forces and justices’ legal advisers to reduce the errors. Anecdotally, and from limited data, the error rate with the new round of SJP proceedings appears to be lower than last year. As the regulations ceased in the summer, the numbers of Covid SJP cases are set to decline.