Dear Abbie 

Review of MoJ’s criminal court statistics 

I am writing to set out the focus of our review of the quality of the Ministry of Justice’s (MoJ) criminal court statistics.  

The background is that these statistics have not been published since March 2024 due to issues with the quality of the source data. As a result of the concerns raised by these issues, and your proactive engagement with us, we have decided to undertake a review of the quality of the criminal court statistics. 

Our review will: 

• examine how MoJ and HMCTS have worked together to identify and investigate the quality issues; 

• review how MoJ and HMCTS are resolving the quality issues; and 

• consider the wider quality improvement work that is being carried out to align the methodologies used to produce HMCTS’s criminal courts management information and MoJ’s official statistics (the ‘One Crown’ project). 

We will conduct this review against the criteria for quality set out in the Code of Practice for Statistics and will report our findings publicly. 

I would be very happy to discuss further. 

I am copying this letter to Antonia Romeo, Permanent Secretary; Ross Gribbin, Director General for Policy, Analysis and Legal Group; Hugh Stickland, Chief Data Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser; and Damon Wingfield, Acting Deputy Director for Courts and People. 

Yours sincerely  

Ed Humpherson
Director General for Regulation