Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of court fines have been written back in each year since 2010.

Financial penalties imposed by the courts will often consist of multiple elements including, amongst others, compensation, victim surcharge, prosecutor’s costs and a fine.

The Government takes the recovery and enforcement of all financial impositions very seriously and remains committed to ensuring impositions are paid. The courts will do everything within their powers to trace those who do not pay and use a variety of sanctions to ensure the recovery of criminal fines and financial penalties.

In very limited scenarios, HMCTS may decide to administratively write-off the debt, the circumstances in which this can happen are severely restricted and occur only when there is no opportunity for the debt to be collected, for example, when a company has been dissolved with no distributable assets. The debt is written off for administrative purposes only, the imposition is still legally enforceable and if in the future it becomes apparent that assets are available to pay the debt then the account is written back. In 2016-17, HMCTS commenced a project to enforce accounts that had previously been written off, this resulted in a period of three financial years where a large number of accounts were written back. There also remain specific and limited situations where the Court can legally cancel any debt.

The table below details the estimated volume and value of the fine element of an imposition that has been administratively written back for each financial year from 2013-14 to 2022-23. Data is not readily available prior to 2013.