In response to a parliamentary question, justice minister Naomi Long said: “Departmental datasets do not hold information in relation to the number of cases dismissed from, or unable to be pursued through, the court system as a result of errors in warrants or improperly completed warrants.”

DUP MLA Joanne Bunting had asked Mrs Long to provide the number of cases which have been dismissed due to warrant problems in the last five years.

Nearly 7,000 cases were dismissed at court between 2016 and 2020, but the justice minister was unable to provide any further breakdown as to why.

Mrs Long told Ms Bunting: “Information as to the reason why a case may have been dismissed may be held as part of court records. We estimate that to locate, retrieve and extract any information that might be relevant to your question would involve work considerably more than the appropriate limit.

“This is due to the information not being held in a readily accessible format, which would therefore require a specific exercise to be completed to extract, validate and aggregate the data in question.”