Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission have been referred to the Court of Appeal, in each year since the Criminal Cases Review Commission was established.

The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), funded by the Ministry of Justice, functions as an independent body, making decisions autonomously and without ministerial influence. Recognising the need to increase the size of its caseworker team and to carry out more outreach work with people who may need their services, the department has increased funding year on year of CCRC since 2020-21 with the budget for 2023-24 set at just under £8m.

In the period from 31/3/1997 to 30/11/2023, the CCRC completed a total of 30,082 reviews and they referred 829 cases to the appellate courts (Court of Appeal and Crown Court). A breakdown of CCRC data by year is provided in table 1.

The tracking of cases referred to the Court of Appeal based on a) new arguments, b) new evidence, and c) neither, has not been systematically recorded since the establishment of the CCRC in 1997. Case referrals are often a combination of both new evidence and other arguments, making it challenging for the CCRC to categorise cases exclusively into these specified criteria.

The number of referrals by the CCRC utilising the exceptional circumstances grounds outlined in section 13(2) of the Criminal Appeal Act 1995 has not been systematically documented for each year by the CCRC since its establishment. However, the CCRC are in the process of constructing a public archive for its referrals, and it is their intention to make this data available to the public in the future. It is important to note that a portion of their referrals involves cases classified as 'no appeal,' where applicants have not exhausted the standard appeal process before approaching the CCRC. In such instances, reliance on the exceptional circumstances provision in section 13(2) becomes necessary.

The CCRC receive a significant number of no appeal cases, reapplications and ineligible cases. The final column in table 1 shows the referral rate as a percentage of the cases which pass the ‘triage’ stage and are allocated to a Case Review Manager for investigation.

Table 1

Work on the creation of the public archive is not complete, but the CCRC anticipate it to be approximately 125 referrals that have involved police misconduct. The CCRC do not have a breakdown on the split between corruption cases and other conduct issues, such as breaches of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, which governs the powers and procedures of the police in the investigation of criminal offenses.