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£9.99The UK government has announced plans to review the oversight of private prosecutions in light of the Post Office Horizon scandal and other cases where there were insufficient safeguards to prevent abuse. Private prosecutions are cases which are brought to criminal courts without the police or Crown Prosecution Service. A consultation will take place in the new year and follow discussions with organisations that have powers to launch specific prosecutions. The consultation will also examine the single justice procedure, which fast tracks minor prosecutions by letter rather than in a court hearing.
In 2020, MPs urged the then government to strengthen safeguards around private prosecutions. Justice Minister Heidi Alexander told BBC News there would be a follow up on these concerns. The Post Office Horizon scandal revealed that private prosecutions brought by the Post Office in relation to sub-postmasters were inappropriate, and a public inquiry is currently investigating what went wrong.
Alexander said that private prosecutions had been brought which resulted in wrongful convictions, and that the same was happening to vulnerable people through the use of the single justice procedure. She said that organisations were prosecuting people in cases where perhaps the public interest in that prosecution had not been proven. The government has said there are no public registers for private prosecutions but there could be around 300,000 such cases each year.
The single justice procedure (SJP) involves entirely paper-based prosecutions, where someone is accused by post of a minor offence, such as a car-insurance violation, and has to defend themselves by letter. About 770,000 prosecutions are dealt with by magistrates each year under the SJP behind closed doors. Concerns around the SJP’s safeguards grew this year after a court ruling found railway companies had been wrongly using the procedure to prosecute people accused of fare dodging. Alexander said the government would not get rid of the SJP but it was necessary to introduce stronger safeguards and ensuring all cases were justified.
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