Nicholas Soames: To ask the Attorney-General how much the Crown Prosecution Service spent on prosecution of offenders under the age of 18 years in each of the last five years. [6501]

Edward Garnier QC MP; The Solicitor-General: The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not capture and report data by reference to the defendant's date of birth and costs incurred.

However, the CPS is able to estimate the approximate internal costs of prosecuting offenders under the age of 18 for each of the last three years as:

£

2007-08 35,500,000

2008-09 26,000,000

2009-10 22,500,000

Equivalent earlier data for 2005-06 and 2006-07 are not available in a comparable format due to a change of process for recording data implemented in 2005.

The costs have been calculated using the number of finalised defendants identified as being young offenders on the CPS case management system and applying the broad average cost of prosecutions using activity based costing data.

The CPS does not capture the actual cost of individual prosecutions, to do so would require a time recording system and that would significantly increase the cost of running the service. However, the service does calculate the average cost of prosecutions through the application of activity based costing techniques.