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Every prosecution brought under the new Coronavirus Act has had to be dropped – for the third month in a row.
A CPS review of completed prosecutions under the hastily-introduced legislation in England and Wales last month found that all nine prosecutions under the Act had to be dropped.
None of the prosecutions was found to apply to potentially infectious people, which is what the Act covers. It gives officers the power to remove or detain people for screening and assessment if they are suspected to have Covid-19.
Out of 271 charges under the Health Protection Regulations, a separate piece of legislation introduced alongside the Act, a more modest 20 were found to have been unlawful. They included four homeless people who were wrongly prosecuted – for being outside.
The Regulations stipulate that, during the lockdown, “no person may leave the place they were living without reasonable excuse”. Unlike the Act, they give powers to break up gatherings and issue fines.
A reasonable excuse included the need to obtain basic necessities, like food and medical supplies for your household or “a vulnerable person”. The law does not apply to homeless people and the charges against the four individuals were withdrawn in court.
Two further cases charged in breach of the Regulations were withdrawn from court because Welsh regulations had been used in England, and two were pulled because of a lack of evidence.
Though no ethnicity data is yet available from the Ministry of Justice for those who were charged under the new laws, today it was revealed that police enforcing the coronavirus lockdown in England and Wales were more than six times more likely to issue fines to BAME people than white people.
Figures obtained by Liberty Investigates, part of the civil liberties group Liberty, and the Guardian, give a force-by-force breakdown ahead of their official release.
Asked by HuffPost UK last month how he would reassure BAME communities that the rules were being enforced fairly, health secretary Matt Hancock said only that officers should be free to do their jobs without “fear or favour”.
Gregor McGill, CPS director of legal services, said: “Continued hard work by the police and Crown Prosecution Service has improved the application and enforcement of the rules under the coronavirus legislation.
“Errors have significantly reduced, with all but one of the incorrect charges immediately identified and withdrawn by prosecutors in court.
“The CPS will continue to review all finalised prosecutions where no fixed penalty notice was offered, as well as every case where someone disputes they have breached the Regulations, for as long as these laws remain in place.”
Last month Gill admitted all of the 44 charges made under the Act since March were also incorrect and had to be dropped.