Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average length was of (a) custodial sentences handed down by magistrates' courts and (b) time subsequently served in prison by people who received those sentences in each of the last three years.

The average length of custodial sentences handed down by magistrates’ courts in England and Wales, from 2012 to 2014, can be viewed on the Ministry of Justice website and it is available at the following link:-

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-justice-system-statistics-quarterly-december-2014

Select and open “Magistrates’ court data tool”

Data held centrally for reporting purposes on the time served in custody does not reliably record whether it was a magistrates’ or Crown Court that imposed the sentence. To answer this question, we would therefore need to match together prison releases and court sentencing data, which could only be undertaken at a disproportionate cost.