Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether an impact assessment was carried out in respect of the removal of the preliminary inquiry stage of court proceedings in serious crime cases in England and Wales; and if he will make a statement.

Section 6(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980 originally contained provisions which obliged a magistrates’ court inquiring into an offence as examining justices to commit a defendant charged with an indictable offence to the Crown Court for trial, if, after consideration of the evidence (including oral evidence), it was of the opinion that there was sufficient evidence to put the defendant on trial by jury. If the court was not of that opinion (and the defendant was in custody for no other reason than that offence), it was obliged to discharge the defendant. Pursuant to a recommendation from the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in 1993, the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 amended the committal provisions (with effect from March 1997) to exclude the possibility of oral evidence. The effect was therefore that magistrates' courts could consider only documentary evidence tendered by the prosecution when determining whether there the defendant should be committed for trial. The resulting paper-based committal proceedings were subsequently replaced by the present procedure in May 2013 when section 6 was repealed, with the result that there is no preliminary examination of the evidence in the magistrates’ court and cases are sent to the Crown Court when it appears to the magistrates’ court that the case is more suitable to be tried there. There was no impact assessment.