Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, on how many occasions the Director of Public Prosecutions has (a) taken over and (b) discontinued private prosecutions in the last 10 years for which data is available.

The Crown Prosecution Service does not maintain an authoritative central record of the number of private prosecutions (a) taken over and (b) discontinued by the Director of Public Prosecutions. To identify the number would require a manual exercise to review individual files which would incur a disproportionate cost.