Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, how many private prosecutions were taken over by the Crown Prosecution Service in each of the last three years for which figures are available; and how many such prosecutions (a) stopped before trial and (b) proceeded to a verdict.

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not maintain a central record of the number of private prosecutions taken over by the CPS and (a) stopped before trial and (b) proceeded to a verdict. To identify the number would require a manual exercise to review individual files which would incur a disproportionate cost.

The specification of the new Common Platform includes a requirement to enable the monitoring of categories such as this.