Single Justice Procedure punishes people for mistakes made 'due to illness or disability'

The Single Justice Procedure’s ‘greatest injustice is that it facilitates convicting people for mistakes, and for errors made due to illness or disability’, justice pressure group Transform Justice has found.

In a highly critical report, the group says that SJP prosecutions form the majority of all criminal prosecutions and two thirds of all magistrates’ court cases. In 2024, there were 780,383 such prosecutions. The most common prosecutions under the SJP are for speeding offences, vehicle registration and excise license offences and railway offences.

‘The SJP charging decision is a blunt instrument to address alleged wrongdoing,’ says the report, titled Industrial-scale prosecution? Why the single justice procedure needs radical reform, said.

Noting that nearly three quarters of SJP defendants do not enter a plea, the report states that no research has been done to understand why. It adds: ‘Nor has anyone launched a legal challenge as to whether the SJP process meets European Court of Human Rights fair trial principles that every defendant needs “to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him”.'

What data is available shows that those from lower income backgrounds are both more likely to be prosecuted and less likely to respond, the report states. 

SJP prosecutors meanwhile ‘do not proactively try to find out whether suspects have disabilities or are vulnerable in other ways’. Information on disability is likely to be available only if the suspect ‘volunteers it in their encounter with the enforcement officer, or if it is screamingly obvious’.

The report asserts: ‘The greatest injustice of the SJP is that it facilitates convicting people for mistakes, and for errors made due to illness or disability. We are prosecuting people at an industrial scale often without any evidence they intended to commit a crime, and with few safeguards. There is nothing wrong with some crimes being strict liability (where no intention needs to be proved), but to do so using an inaccessible, untransparent system is surely unfair.’

A lack of scrutiny over the use of the procedure also comes in for crticism. Through a Freedom of Information request, Transform Justice found Birmingham City Council’s SJP notice for parents prosecuted for not sending their children to school regularly refers to a parenting order which ‘in fact…cannot be imposed via the SJP’.

The report’s recommendations include ensuring SJP prosecutors are subject to regular inspection, to ‘open up the system’ and commission research to find out who SJP defendants are and the key barriers to responding to the prosecution notice.

It adds: ‘The government should provide a free phone line for those who want help filling in the form, and fund law centres, Citizens’ Advice Bureaux and other third sector organisations to offer advice to SJP defendants, as they do for litigants in-person. And a good AI-based app should be designed to help defendants navigate the process.’