THE SAMPLE, NOT THE STAMP

What goes around comes around; an old adage which is understood worldwide and comes home to roost on this site. Since the first post here in 2013 this will be number 1,580 but it`s unlikely 13 years from now to be the most viewed.  That privilege currently belongs to a post  published Friday, 16th August 2013 titled WARRANTS OF ENTRY & UTILITY COMPANIES//SIX OF THE BEST. When I discovered this my first thought was that something somewhere is going wrong. What can a 13 year old and older series of posts offer to a reader in a world where 13 years has seen a totomic change in British society?  It remains, extraordinarily, the most visited "old" post on this site;  proof, if proof were needed, that the British public's appetite for stories of bailiffs, bullying and bench sitters being taken for fools has not diminished with the years.

Comparing that post to the current legal and procedural landscape the process for obtaining a warrant of entry to disconnect electricity or gas supply or fit a prepayment meter has changed in several concrete ways.   Since 6th February 2023 the listing and determination of applications for warrants of entry for the purpose of installing a prepayment meter was suspended with immediate effect, following Ofgem's announcement of a market wide review into the practice.  This followed an investigation (triggered by a Times exposé of British Gas debt agents breaking into homes) that found companies were bypassing Ofgem guidelines by obtaining rushed court warrants with several hundred warrants sometimes signed off in minutes leaving no time for genuine evaluation of individual cases; essentially confirming, at national scale, exactly the "rubber-stamping" the blog had complained about for years. 

Readers might recall my complaint of a decade ago that too many colleagues treated these applications as legal confetti,  signed, sealed and handed back across the table before the ink was dry, with scarcely a glance at the "particulars" behind the request. I described Southern Electric turning up with nothing but an address and a debt figure, expecting us to wave it through like a parking permit. I described a bailiff who could not confirm the name on the account she wished to force her way into. These were not isolated eccentricities. They were, it now transpires, symptomatic of an industry-wide practice that eventually became a matter of national outrage rather than merely magistrates' court gossip.

After the listing of prepayment meter warrant applications was suspended nationwide on 6th February 2023 on 21st February 2023 Ofgem announced that two suppliers had been given permission to restart and the courts recommenced listing such applications only once suppliers had satisfied Ofgem's new standards. So a supplier must now clear a regulatory gate with Ofgem before it can even bring a warrant application to a magistrate; an extra check that didn't exist in 2013. The complete sequencing of the revised requirements was as follows:-

6 February 2023 — listing of prepayment meter warrant applications suspended nationwide.

10 March 2023 — Ofgem announced all suppliers had signed up to the updated Code of Practice.

8 January 2024 — Ofgem announced three suppliers had been given permission to restart involuntary PPM installations.

21 February 2024 — Ofgem confirmed a further two suppliers had been given such permission.

Only once a supplier had satisfied Ofgem's new criteria  company by company, not industry wide,  did the courts recommence listing such applications at all.

Mandatory pre-application steps are now written into supplier licences, not just "good practice".  The Good Practice Guide the blog described was voluntary and unevenly followed. It's since been formalised as a licence condition. From 8th November 2023 energy suppliers must follow new stricter rules before a prepayment meter can be involuntarily installed  including making at least 10 attempts to contact the customer and carrying out a site welfare visit before installation with the highest-risk customers (e.g. those on powered medical equipment) exempted entirely. The rules specifically end forced installations for people over 85 and those with high-risk illnesses.

The hard and welcoming fact is that the system has actually changed and changed for the better.  There is also, at last, a fee protection I would have welcomed a decade ago.  Standard Licence Condition 28B now caps such charges and prohibits suppliers passing on costs associated with obtaining the warrant itself. It will not undo the injustice suffered by those who wrote to me in 2014 and 2016 describing the many repeat applications against them  but it should prevent the same happening to others.  Ofgem has extended the relevant licence conditions to 30th June 2027. 

Does this mean the rubber stamp has been retired for good? I would not go so far. Judicial guidance now explicitly directs magistrates to satisfy themselves that Ofgem's standards, the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Rights of Entry (Gas and Electricity Boards) Act 1954 have all been properly engaged with  which is welcome but guidance is only as good as the bench applying it, crowded list or no crowded list. As I have said before and evidently must say again: it will take a brave and diligent bench to make sure this is more than paper reform.

However life is not all sunshine and rainbows for those unable to cope with rising utility bills.  There is one further wrinkle the original six posts could never have anticipated and it deserves its own footnote for those of a procedural turn of mind. The old model, whatever its failings, was at least one of individual attention: a bench, a bailiff and a single warrant argued (or not argued) on its own facts. The new regime abandons that model almost entirely. Applications now arrive not as bundles of paper across a table but as a CSV file submitted electronically to an assigned court office with a separate file for each purpose:  prepayment installation, commercial disconnection, safety or theft cases and so on. The written information for each case is confirmed on oath and filed by the court officer sight unseen by the magistrate save in sample form.  

For lists under 100 cases the guidance recommends the bench examine five; for larger lists, ten  with at least five prepayment cases guaranteed a look whatever the total. If those samples satisfy the court the remainder are granted en bloc. Only "unusual applications," particularly residential disconnection, must still be heard individually.

I confess to mixed feelings. It is, in one sense, precisely the sort of structured, evidence based scrutiny I spent years wishing my colleagues would apply case by case. And yet it is also, by design, a system in which the overwhelming majority of warrants are never individually seen by the magistrate signing for them, merely inferred safe by statistical proxy. Whether that is judicial efficiency or rubber-stamping wearing a spreadsheet, readers might judge for themselves.

With continual criticism rightly falling on the Single Justice Procedure and the judicial acceptance of a statistical analysis to determine whether or not a utility disconnection or prepayment meter at an additional cost to the consumer is installed, judgement appears to be ever more distant  from the individual whose door may yet be broken down and drifting instead toward a bureaucratic exercise in probability where the fate of the many rests not on the facts of their own case but on whether a handful of others' paperwork happened to pass muster on a given morning.  

THE JUSTICE LADDER/THE MISSING STATISTICS: BY ACCIDENT OR DESIGN?

The world of 2026 does not revolve around the sun; it revolves around statistics.  From Pythagoras to Einstein via Euclid and  Newton numbers have shaped the world we live in and know today.  We, the public, unable to put our ear to the closed door whisperings of our masters  have only the numbers these masters provide to us in order to make our judgements as to whether we wish them to continue with their policies for another parliamentary term.  Nowhere is this filtering of information more profound than at the door in Petty France London SW1 home to the Ministry of Justice. 

There are several descriptions of this filtering.  It is a system where some information is readily made available, some must be extracted under Freedom of Information rules and some is kept under wraps.  It could be The Empirical Boundaries of Justice; The Parameters of Judicial Transparency; The Quantifiable Outlines of Justice; The Statistical Architecture of Justice; The Informational Perimeter of Justice; The Justice Audit but I will settle for the simplicity of The Metrics of Justice. 

In order to interpret the numbers available for inspection it is helpful to know how they are chosen.  There are various agencies and authorities which decide which aspects of justice are important enough to measure and publish.  Court and sentencing data originate largely within HMCTS and other justice agencies and are analysed and published by the Ministry of Justice's statistical and analytical teams. Professional authority over what constitutes and how official statistics are published rests with the Ministry's Head of Profession for Statistics. The wider system is overseen by the UK Statistics Authority and its Office for Statistics Regulation while the ONS independently produces the principal national crime statistics.

With millions of numbers available the decisions on which to collate and publish are made by the Head of Profession for Statistics supported by the Chief Statistician and the relevant statistical teams within the MOJ.  Perhaps just as interesting to the casual observer are the statistics not published. Some that come to mind are:-

Outcomes by individual magistrates' bench;

Conviction rates by individual court;

Appeals and their outcomes by individual court;

Reasons for successful appeals;

Cases abandoned because of prosecution failures;

Defendants waiting more than specified periods;

The proportion of cases in which witnesses attend unnecessarily;

The number of cases where a legal error is corrected before an appeal;

Comparative outcomes for magistrates and District Judges.

The above list is not in any order of significance.  I would think that some readers will have their own ideas of additions which they would consider to be equally or more important.  With controversial changes to the jurisdiction of magistrates courts hiding behind other more pressing current matters within the MOJ there are some valuable pointers as to the quality of justice in the lower courts system.  Of the defendants who appealed a magistrates' conviction in 2024 41% had their appeal allowed. Of those appealing sentence 44% had their appeal allowed.  It`s interesting to note that the comparable numbers for 2010  appeals are 44% allowed against conviction and 47% against sentence allowed.  Observers outside the legal fraternity might wish to come to their own conclusions about very fine disparity between those numbers considering how much water has flowed under the legal bridge in that time period. 

An appeal from the magistrates court is in reality a re-hearing before a crown court judge or recorder sitting with two magistrates. An appeal from the crown court against conviction or sentence goes to Court of Appeal (Criminal Division). In 2025 that court received 4,162 applications.  These can be broken down into 1,181 applications concerning conviction, 2,588 concerning sentence and 393 other appeals.

However those statistics don`t tell the whole story; there are numerical gaps. From 2022/3 the success rate fell from 62% to 37% in 2024/25. We do not know if the appeals were successful because of new evidence, process failure, insufficient evidence, a misdirected jury or legal error[s] or conversely why the majority failed.

As we go higher up the ladder of appeal the stakes for defendants, victims and the public perception become higher.  In 2024–25 the Supreme Court decided 170 applications for permission to appeal granting permission in 61 (36.1%).  A criminal appeal normally requires certification that there is a “point of law of general public importance” and that the point ought to be considered by the Supreme Court which is effectively the finest filter in a complex system of legal filtration.  To continue the analogy a simple flow chart could be shown as follows:-

 

Applications → Permission refused → Permission granted → Hearing → Appeal allowed → Conviction quashed.  

The Supreme Court already records much of the underlying information but its published headline statistics do not present it in the form needed to assess the effectiveness of criminal appeals. It would seem that the permission granted → appeal heard → conviction quashed figures are available only in the labyrinths of Petty France.

The subject of early release of prisoners has made headline news since the change of prime minister prompted a rocket to be sent up the arse of the movers and shakers at the MOJ.  The Parole Board for the justice system can be likened to Camp IV, also known as the South Col for mountaineers.  It is the last stop before the final arbiter of whether justice has been done;  The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC). 

The statistics published by the Parole Board for 2025/26 are:- 

3,140 prisoners directed for release

12,528 refused release

8,835 oral hearings

The Board says its convicted Serious Further Offences rate remains below 0.7%. Figures it supplies tell us how many prisoners the Parole Board releases and how many subsequently commit a Serious Further Offence but it leaves a gap insofar as it does not publish statistics on  how many of those released prisoners subsequently commit any proven offence, how many offences they commit, how serious those offences are and whether the rate differs according to the sentence they were serving.  The table below illustrates the statistics that the Parole Board does not supply.

Especially considering the current furore about early release of prisoners occasioned by the crisis in prison accommodation  it must be asked whether the Parole Board`s limited public information is by accident or design.  

At the end of the criminal appeals process sits an institution which is perhaps the most revealing of all when we ask whether the criminal justice system is measuring its own failures. The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) describes itself as the very last stage of the Criminal Justice System. It was established in 1997 to investigate alleged miscarriages of justice in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and where it considers there is a real possibility that a conviction would not be upheld, to refer the case back to an appeal court. It is therefore not another tier of appeal: it is an independent safety net for cases which have normally already failed at the ordinary appeal stage. The numbers are small in relation to the thousands of criminal convictions produced by the courts but they are difficult to ignore.

The CCRC's 2023/24 report recorded 1,629 applications and 25 referrals. In 2024/25 it received 1,541 applications and referred 31 cases; importantly, of the 27 CCRC-referred appeals actually heard that year, 18 were allowed and nine dismissed. In 2025/26 applications rose to a record 1,841, while referrals increased to 45, an 80% increase over the figure two years earlier.

The longer-term figures are perhaps more striking. By July 2026 the CCRC had received 35,723 applications, referred 926 cases to the appeal courts and 622 appeals had succeeded. Thus once a case has actually survived the CCRC's investigation and reached an appeal court, the outcome is very different from the initial application statistics.

This is why the CCRC should be included in any serious attempt to measure the effectiveness of criminal justice. The relevant question is not simply “How many applications does the CCRC receive?” Nor is it “What percentage does it refer?” The more revealing sequence is:

Conviction → ordinary appeal → CCRC application → CCRC referral → appeal heard → conviction or sentence overturned.

The CCRC itself makes clear that, after referral, it remains for the appeal court to decide whether the conviction is unsafe or the sentence unfair.

That final distinction matters. A justice system which records convictions, sentences and appeals but does not prominently display what happens when an independent body identifies a possible miscarriage risks measuring its activity rather than its accuracy. The CCRC is therefore not an embarrassing footnote to the system. It is arguably its final quality-control mechanism. It is in effect the Mount Everest of the appeals system. 

And the question for those who decide which statistics should define the success of criminal justice is a simple one: should the number of convictions subsequently found unsafe be treated as a central measure of the system's performance, rather than as an exceptional statistic at the end of the ladder?

The figures reveal an uncomfortable truth. At every stage of the criminal justice ladder statistics are collected but the figures which most directly test whether justice has been done are often the least visible. Appeals, parole and the CCRC provide opportunities to correct error yet the system rarely presents these stages as one continuous measure of accuracy. Perhaps the fundamental question is not how efficiently the system processes cases but how often it gets them right.