STATISTICAL GAPS LEAVE ROOM FOR SPECULATION

The Ministry of Justice has been accused of many errors in policy and practice but what it cannot be accused of is the production of statistics.  We might not be told the ethnicity of the magistrates on any one sitting but we do have information of the magistracy as a whole.  We do not have or need to know the age or sex of those advocates appearing for a defendant but myriad gigabytes  are in the ether telling us of eg  the elapsed time from a defendant`s first appearance to sentence or indeed the delay from charge to that first appearance.  A major court function where there appears to be a gap in published information is the failure-to-appear (FTA) rate among defendants granted bail.

The MOJ isn`t short of employees being paid to provide the numbers that politicians and others pour over relentlessly.  The MoJ's Data & Analysis Directorate is described as a multi-disciplinary team of around 500 staff, covering analysts, statisticians, researchers, economists and data scientists across the department. A precise breakdown of how many of those 500 are specifically classified as statisticians (as opposed to other analytical professions) doesn't appear to be publicly published in an easily accessible form. The closest public data would be the Government Statistical Service (GSS) workforce statistics, which track statisticians across all government departments.  Nevertheless we do know that the approximate numbers granted bail at magistrates' courts were:

The question of how many failed to answer bail and had warrants issued is another matter. The Ministry of Justice does not publish a direct national statistic linking magistrates court bail grants to subsequent failures to appear. However, a recent investigation reported that nearly 60,000 arrest warrants for defendants failing to attend court were issued in England and Wales in the most recent year, with the annual figure having risen by about 50% since 2020. Although the Ministry of Justice no longer appears to publish a current annual figure there are some useful historical benchmarks. A Parliamentary Answer stated that across all courts in England and Wales, approximately 11–12% of bailed defendants failed to appear during the late 1990s and early 2000s. For 2006 the figure was about 10%. Ministry of Justice statistics noted that FTA warrants had been falling and that by 2012/13 police forces received about 70,400 FTA warrants annually with 88% executed. The MoJ expressly linked this to declining numbers of defendants who failed to appear on bail or summons. Trying to make some sort of sense of the available numbers is that a single defendant can fail to attend more than once and not every failure to appear arises from a defendant who was granted bail. Around half a million defendants were granted bail in magistrates courts over 2022–2024. Historical Ministry of Justice and NAO evidence suggests that somewhere between one in ten and one in seven bailed defendants may fail to attend at least one hearing, implying a broad range of roughly 50,000–75,000 failures to appear over a three-year period, but no current official national statistic appears to be published.

A Parliamentary Answer in 2021 disclosed HMCTS management information on FTA warrants. The answer confirms that HMCTS can extract warrant data directly from court systems and that the figures are management information rather than official statistics. Some police forces have recently released data on outstanding FTA warrants.  Dyfed-Powys Police reported 108 outstanding FTA warrants as of January 2026 of which 95 related to magistrates court matters and 13 to crown court matters. West Yorkshire Police reported 2,148 outstanding FTA warrants as of January 2026 covering Bail Act and magistrates  court warrant categories.

The Ministry of Justice publishes numbers granted bail,  numbers remanded in custody and the numbers of FTA warrants. It does not appear to publish a dataset linking those events at defendant level. Consequently, there is no routinely published national figure saying: "X% of defendants granted bail at magistrates courts failed to surrender and had a warrant issued."  The key historical figures published by HMCTS were:-

Currently there is no simple straightforward answer to the question:-  of those granted bail how many failed to answer that  bail?

To sum up; Roughly half a million defendants were granted bail by magistrates' courts during 2022–2024. Magistrates courts have historically issued tens of thousands of FTA warrants annually, typically around 90,000 in the published HMCTS series. The Ministry of Justice does not publish a defendant-level statistic showing what percentage of bailed defendants subsequently fail to surrender.


With all the facts at its disposal yet such a gap in the published statistics one wonders why such basic information is not available for all to see and comment upon. Where there is such a deficit there is always room for speculation by those with an interest in the subject.