Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: June 2025
Source: gov.uk (2025-10-22)

Overview of trends in the use of out of court disposals, defendants prosecuted, offenders convicted, remand and sentencing decisions in England and Wales.

Details

This report presents key statistics on activity in the Criminal Justice System (CJS) for England and Wales. It provides commentary for the 12-month period of July 2024 to June 2025 (referred to as the ‘latest year’). The contents of this bulletin will be of interest to government policy makers in the development of policy and their subsequent monitoring and evaluation. Others will be interested in the way different crimes are dealt with in the CJS and trends in sentencing outcomes.

Statistician’s comment

The volume of prosecutions and convictions reached their highest levels since year ending June 2018, reflecting the increased demand entering the criminal courts as police charge volumes increase.

The use of out of court disposals increased in the latest year, reversing a downward trend seen since 2020. This was due to the continued increase in community resolutions, which now account for around 80% of all out of court disposals in the latest year. All other out of court disposals reduced.

The number of prosecutions increased for all indictable offences groups over the last year and the pattern followed for convictions, with the number of offenders convicted for violence against the person and sexual offences reaching series highs since comparable records from 2010.

The number of offenders sentenced to immediate custody continued to increase and is at the highest level seen since 2018. The latest year shows a slight reduction in the average custodial sentence length, partly driven by an increase in the proportion of sentences that are for theft offences which attract shorter sentence lengths.

Changes and revisions in this publication

Magistrates’ court data development

Please note as part of our ongoing data development, since the previous publication, we have identified some duplicate records that led to an exaggerated number of withdrawn cases at magistrates’ courts. Following case-level reviews and close working with system owners we have removed the duplicates and resolved the issue in this release.

This has led to the removal of 3,563 in the withdrawn disposal defendant counts in 2024 – trends remain broadly unchanged.

In addition, we have identified potential data quality concerns regarding the published plea counts at the magistrates’ courts. While work is ongoing to investigate identified discontinuities we have removed the plea data from our published magistrates’ data tool.

Crown Court data development (“One Crown”)

MoJ and HMCTS have worked together on the “One Crown” data project (https://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.publishing.service.gov.uk%2Fmedia%2F67e298ced4a1b0665b8ee1fe%2FConsultation_on__One_Crown__changes_to_the_Crown_Court_data_processing_in_CCSQ.docx&wdOrigin=BROWSELINK) to create a single, consistent and flexible dataset that meets both MoJ and HMCTS needs. This has brought greater transparency, clarity and coherence for all users of the published Criminal Court Statistics series (https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics).

Historically the two MoJ published series concerning criminal courts have been produced independently from distinct pipelines which is inefficient and risks undermining transparency. Moving to the same data model will improve the coherence across MoJ, provide a clear set of shared definitions across the topic for users and ensure the data best reflects operational reality of the underlying administrative systems.

We postponed the August 2025 publication of CJSQ to start the necessary data development and carry out quality assurance of the One Crown outputs. Good progress has been made and we are continuing to quality assure the data and refine definitions to ensure that the new CJS data series are robust before we adopt the change.

The data presented here is in line with the historical data pipelines. We hope to move to the One Crown pipeline from January 2026 – we will set out and quantify the impact of changes to the data pipeline alongside clear reasons for any observed change.