Niall Hearty on why private prosecutions have become increasingly popular
- Private prosecutions are on the rise as stretched public authorities and growing fraud push more people to seek their own route to justice.
- Success depends on expert guidance, swift evidence gathering and a clear assessment of whether this route is truly the best option.
There are few aspects of legal life that are not fully recorded, reported on and capable of being assessed through stacks of statistics. But private prosecutions appears to be one.
While there is no database that gives figures for the number of private prosecutions brought each year, the anecdotal evidence indicates this has been an expanding area of law for over a decade.
Just as there is no set of figures to detail the scale of the rise in private prosecutions, there is also no single, clear-cut reason for that increase. It can be argued, with some justification, that cuts to police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) funding have led to many people looking to bring their own prosecutions, rather than rely on the overstretched
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