The Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) is the statutory body responsible for investigating alleged miscarriages of justice in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Those referrals came from a total of 21,780 cases closed during that period, meaning that the commission has referred for appeal around 2.91% of the applications it has considered.

[4] The cases referred for appeal by the commission tend to come from the most serious end of the criminal spectrum; just over 25% of referrals have been for murder convictions, almost 12% have been for rapes, and 8% have been for robberies.

This evidence or argument must not have been considered at the time of the trial, at the initial appeal, or in an earlier application to the commission.

Again, there is an "exceptional circumstances" caveat that allows the commission to refer cases with no new evidence or argument, but such instances are extremely rare.

The commission is an independent non-departmental public body funded by way of a cash grant from the Ministry of Justice.

The power was also reactive in that the secretary could considered the issues raised by only applicants or their representatives, and could not investigate further or seek new grounds for appeal.

A source of frequent criticism was that the same person responsible for the police could control whether or not a conviction was overturned.

These cases featured a mixture of false confessions, police misconduct, non-disclosure, and unreliable expert forensic testimony.

It concluded (adopting the view expressed by Sir John May in his inquiry into the Guildford and Woolwich bombings) that the arrangements for referring cases back to the courts were incompatible with the constitutional separation of judicial and executive powers.

He also objected to it counting its successes in terms of individual people rather than cases, and to the CCRC overturning relatively minor convictions.

[8] The commission's response to this criticism was to refer to its case work statistics which show, as mentioned above, that just over 25% of its more than 600 referrals have been for murder convictions, almost 12% have been for rapes, and 8% have been for robberies and the rest relate to a mixture of other offences, mostly serious and indictable-only.

A number of the cases Woffinden himself worked on were also overturned due to the CCRC, such as that of Sion Jenkins and Barry George.

It is feared that cuts to legal aid and failure to disclose evidence have increased the risk of miscarriages of justice so the commission is more needed than it was in the past.

[22] The University of Oxford social sciences department noted that, as well as Barry George, people such as a group of legal asylum seekers and refugees who narrowly avoided being wrongly deported in 2005 had been "spared" from miscarriages of justice "thanks to the Criminal Cases Review Commission".

[25] After stepping down from his role after 10 years Jessel criticised the "caricature" of the CCRC as an "institutional villain".

[26] Commissioners have disagreed with claims that they are "too cautious" in making referrals by pointing to how they have in fact often allowed applicants to take their case to the Court of Appeal despite still suspecting them to be guilty, with former commissioner Ewan Smith saying in 2011: "In the four and a half years I've been on the Commission, I have only come across two people I believed to be absolutely innocent.

The Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she was seeking the removal of Helen Pitcher from her position as chair of the Commission.

"[33] After Pitcher’s resignation, Malkinson said action was needed on the Commission to "refresh the whole thing, call it something else, completely dissolve it".