- On 23 June 2020, the Attorney General’s Office answered a written parliamentary question tabled by Richard Holden MP. The written answer included incorrect figures relating to the number of overall appeals, and successful appeals that the Department has made against unduly lenient sentences.The question was:“To ask the Attorney General, how many (a) appeals and (b) successful appeals the Government has made against sentences on the basis of undue leniency, in each of the last 20 years.” [61628]The Departmental answer was:The statistics from 2000 are provided below. It should be noted that Attorney General’s Office does not hold accurate data prior to 2001 and we are not in possession of the data indicating the number of successful appeals for the year 2000”.However, checks on our data have revealed that some minor corrections need to be made. These corrections are included in square brackets below.
Year
Appeals the Government has made against sentences on the basis of undue leniency
Successful appeals the Government has made against sentences on the basis of undue
2000
31
Data unavailable
2001
147 [160]
90
2002
148 [135]
94 [92]
2003
96
78 [77]
2004
105 [136]
66 [85]
2005
108
67
2006
144
104
2007
76 [106]
53 [75]
2008
59 [71]
46 [51]
2009
84 [108]
58 [71]
2010
77 [78]
60
2011
117
94
2012
82
62
2013
70
61
2014
122
106
2015
136
102
2016
180 [190]
130 [141]
2017
173
137
2018
140
99
2019
97 [93]
63 [65]
Through this ministerial statement I am correcting this error, which arose out of the method used to collate the data. The Department now has more robust systems for collating and quality assuring the unduly lenient sentence data it publishes.[HCWS331]