HC Deb 07 March 1996 vol 273 c336W
Dr. John Cunningham

To ask the Attorney-General on how many occasions the public interest has been evoked in each of the last three years to protect from prosecution persons against whom the Metropolitan police had established sufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction for(a) alleged theft and (b) blackmail. [19357]

The Solicitor-General

Following charge, or in cases where advice is sought, it is the Crown Prosecution Service which decides whether a prosecution should proceed or continue. While the service maintains detailed statistics on the cases, it deals with it does not break those figures down either by police force or by type of offence. In order to determine the number of cases which were not prosecuted on public interest grounds it would be necessary to check each file individually. This could be done only at disproportionate cost.