One third of suspected crimes fail to reach court

Almost a third of criminal suspects arrested in the past year were not charged, government figures have shown.

Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, has admitted that out of 550,000 cases leading to arrests last year, 160,000 were dropped.

This is a substantially higher number than was expected by the government and we need to know why.

Either police are not preparing cases as well as they should be, which seems unlikely, or the Crown Prosecution Service are getting more choosy about when to charge.

We owe it to the victims concerned to get to the bottom of this. At the moment it is out of order that so many cases are being investigated and then nothing happens.