PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Criminal Proceedings: Legal Representation (14 July 2015)

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many defendants in criminal proceedings in (a) police stations and (b) courts in each region of England and Wales were unable to secure legal representation in each week between 3 June 2015 and 1 July 2015.

Asked by:
Karl Turner (Labour)

In the vast majority of cases requiring a solicitor at the police station, a solicitor has been deployed within an hour. The Ministry of Justice does not retain details of detainees at police station who, having requested legal advice, do not then obtain it. There have always been a number of reasons why an individual might not receive advice, such as the detainee changing their mind or the police releasing the detainee before advice is provided.

The courts are sitting as usual. The representation status and the number of adjournments in magistrates’ court proceedings, and the reasons for them, are not centrally recorded. For Crown Court cases, data on reasons for adjournments are centrally recorded, but a lack of legal representation is not included within the list of possible reasons for an adjournment. Further, representation status is centrally recorded, but the reasons why an individual might be unrepresented are not.

Experimental data on the number of defendants dealt with in the Crown Court who are known to have had legal representation at their first hearing was published for the first time in the Criminal Court Statistics Quarterly publication on 25 June 2015, covering the period 2010 and 2014. These statistics are available via the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-court-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2015

Answered by:
Andrew Selous (Conservative)
22 July 2015