Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what comparative data his Department holds on the number of criminal cases involving domestic abuse in which there has been victim attrition in the year ending March (a) 2020 and (b) 2021.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) does not hold data directly on “victim attrition”. No data is available centrally for the Magistrates Court. The closest data available relates to trials that are cracked due to witness absence/withdrawal at the Crown Court. A cracked trial refers to a trial that does not go ahead on the planned day as an outcome is reached in advance and so does not need to be re-scheduled. This occurs when either an acceptable plea is offered by the defendant, or the prosecution offers no evidence against the defendant.
Our data relates to ‘Violence against the person’ as opposed to ‘domestic abuse’, as a domestic abuse flag is not available within our datasets. Just over one-third (35%) of the 1,680,884 ‘violence against the person’ offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020 were domestic abuse-related (ONS, year ending March 2020).
As the next publication of this data is not until June, the PQ cannot be answered comparatively at this point. The MoJ can however provide alternative comparative data on the number of criminal cases involving ‘violence against the person’. The latest data relating to January-December 2019 and January-December 2020 was published in December 2020 and shows: