Criminal Cases Review Commission

(asked on 12th December 2023) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what has been the average referral rate for the Criminal Cases Review Commission in each year since it was established.


Answered by
Laura Farris Portrait
Laura Farris
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Ministry of Justice) (jointly with Home Office)
This question was answered on 20th December 2023

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

Financial year

Referrals

Intake

All Cases closed

Review Cases closed

Referral rate all closed cases

Referral rate closed review cases only

1997/98

11

1328

CCRC system data not robust enough for reporting

1998/99

31

1033

1999/00

36

775

2000/01

45

799

2001/02

38

834

2002/03

35

933

2003/04

30

884

2004/05

45

955

2005/06

47

937

2006/07

39

1051

2007/08

27

984

1085

629

2.49%

4.29%

2008/09

39

919

942

535

4.14%

7.29%

2009/10

31

932

892

468

3.48%

6.62%

2010/11

22

933

947

533

2.32%

4.13%

2011/12

22

1040

878

469

2.51%

4.69%

2012/13

21

1625

1274

560

1.65%

3.75%

2013/14

31

1470

1131

404

2.74%

7.67%

2014/15

36

1599

1632

758

2.21%

4.75%

2015/16

33

1480

1797

1085

1.84%

3.04%

2016/17

12

1397

1563

918

0.77%

1.31%

2017/18

19

1439

1538

904

1.24%

2.10%

2018/19

13

1371

1449

773

0.90%

1.68%

2019/20

29

1334

1453

745

2.00%

3.89%

2020/21

70

1142

1109

566

6.31%

12.37%

2021/22

26

1198

1183

546

2.20%

4.76%

2022/23

25

1424

1275

573

1.96%

4.36%

2023/24 YTD

16

1071

983

399

1.63%

4.01%

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.

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