Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what is the (a) annual cost to the public purse for the Legal Aid Agency to process applications for exceptional case funding and (b) value of exceptional case funding claims that have been (i) granted and (ii) denied in the each of the last three years.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The information requested is not held centrally.
The unit cost of processing an application is not specifically tracked or recorded by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA), nor is the administrative spend on Exceptional Case Funding (ECF) recorded separately to general legal aid administrative spend. Details about volumes of ECF applications, broken down by category, for every year since 2013 can be found in legal aid statistics published by the Ministry of Justice [see tables 8.1 and 8.2]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/legal-aid-statistics-april-to-june-2023
Legal Aid Expenditure is tracked by the form of service it is provided under i.e. whether it is advice and assistance provided under Legal Help or Controlled Legal Representation or representation in proceedings provided as Civil Representation. ECF can be provided under either form of service. These costs are paid via a number of different billing platforms, not all of which have the functionality to isolate ECF costs from other civil costs. It is therefore not possible to disaggregate the value of ECF cases from the value of other civil in-scope cases. Expenditure under the ECF scheme therefore forms part of the overall civil legal aid expenditure as detailed in tables 5.3 and 6.5 of the published legal aid statistics https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/legal-aid-statistics-april-to-june-2023.
The LAA would not hold any information regarding the value of claims where it has refused an application for funding under ECF. The value of the claim would only be apparent at the conclusion of the case after a bill was submitted to the Legal Aid Agency. If legal aid under ECF is not granted, no bill is submitted.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what is the annual (a) cost of the Legal Aid Agency’s audit and compliance activities and (b) value of the funds recovered from legal aid providers as a result of the Legal Aid Agency’s audit and compliance activity.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
Information relating to element (a) of the question is not centrally held. The cost of time spent, and expenditure associated with audit and compliance functions is not specifically tracked or recorded by the Legal Aid Agency (LAA). Staff engaged in audit and compliance activity may not exclusively be engaged in these functions and as such it is not possible to reliably calculate an estimate of costs based on staff salaries.
The LAA estimates that in the financial year 2022-2023 it recovered £4.56 million as a result of audit and compliance activities. This is based on audit and compliance activity relating to Controlled Work, Crime Lower including police station attendance and duty solicitor advice and Prison Law claims which are typically paid prior to review by the LAA. For Civil Representation and Crime Higher the LAA has robust assessment processes in place which form part of the billing processes rather than audit and compliance activity. Other recoveries can be made as a result of routine case management processes such as quality control procedures, which the LAA would not classify as distinct audit or compliance activity. In the same period the LAA processed over 1.7 million claims totalling £1.83 billion pounds.
Audit and compliance activity does not solely lead to financial recoveries. This activity also helps to improve providers’ understanding of and compliance with contracts and legal aid legislation, supports identification of process improvement opportunities, and provides confidence in the positive performance of providers.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many litigants in person there have been in the family courts in each year since 2013.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
Information on the legal representation status of applicants and respondents is published in Family Courts Statistics Quarterly, within the Family Court Tables: April to June 2023, Table 11. Please see link below.
Family Court Statistics Quarterly: April to June 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of the proposals put forward by the Senior President of Tribunals that employment cases be heard by a single judge by default on the judicial diversity of Employment Tribunals.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The Senior President of Tribunals (SPT) will become responsible for the future arrangements for panel composition once the provisions of the Judicial Review and Courts Act (2022) are brought into effect. We intend to enact this delegation of powers later this year. Following this, any decisions made on the matter of panel composition will be informed by the consultation published earlier in the year, in which views on his proposals were sought.
As such, the final proposals on Employment Tribunal panel composition will be a matter for the Senior President of Tribunals. We understand that the SPT intends to publish a response to the consultation in due course, once the measures have been brought into effect. Judicial diversity is a key priority for the Ministry of Justice. As a member of the Judicial Diversity Forum, we work closely with the judiciary, the Judicial Appointments Commission, the Legal Services Board and the legal professions to promote diversity in the judiciary across each jurisdiction.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the latest status is of proposals of the Senior President of Tribunals to have Employment Tribunal cases heard by a single judge by default.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The Senior President of Tribunals (SPT) will become responsible for the future arrangements for panel composition once the provisions of the Judicial Review and Courts Act (2022) are brought into effect. We intend to enact this delegation of powers later this year. Following this, any decisions made on the matter of panel composition will be informed by the consultation published earlier in the year, in which views on his proposals were sought.
As such, the final proposals on Employment Tribunal panel composition will be a matter for the Senior President of Tribunals. We understand that the SPT intends to publish a response to the consultation in due course, once the measures have been brought into effect. Judicial diversity is a key priority for the Ministry of Justice. As a member of the Judicial Diversity Forum, we work closely with the judiciary, the Judicial Appointments Commission, the Legal Services Board and the legal professions to promote diversity in the judiciary across each jurisdiction.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 12 June 2023 to Question 188260 on Magistrates' Courts: ICT, how many and what proportion of defendants have appeared without legal representation in magistrates’ courts where the Common Platform has been used by (a) court and (b) the alleged criminal offence of the defendant in each of the past three years.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
Common platform first started receiving criminal cases in September 2020.
The total number of defendants whose cases have been handled on Common Platform is 456,597 of which 231,223 had no legal representation recorded on the case. It is important to note that this data includes Single Justice Service Cases.
The attached spreadsheet breaks down defendants by a) court and b) by criminal offence and are for the period September 2020 – June 2023.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 12 June 2023 to Question 188261 on Crown Court: Standards, to provide this data by each Crown Court.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The a) mean and b) median length of time taken from (i) receipt at Crown Court to main hearing, (ii) main hearing to completion and (iii) receipt at Crown Court to completion for all offences can be found in the attached table. Timeliness data broken down by Crown Court are not available prior to 2014.
The latest published data is available to March 2023 and shows that timeliness estimates at the Crown Court continue to increase. This was a result of cases completing including trials impacted by the Criminal Bar Association action and in some cases, the suspension of jury trial during the pandemic.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 12 June 2023 to Question 188262 on Criminal Proceedings: Databases, what recent estimate he has made of when the external data catalogue will be published.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
We plan to complete the first phase of the data catalogue project by the end of September 2023. The objectives of this phase are to identify tooling that meets our requirements, including for an external view of the catalogue, and to pilot with an initial HMCTS service. If this completes successfully, we will plan roll-out to include more datasets and internal users in the first instance, with external to follow.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 12 June 2023 to Question 188259 on Treatment of, and Outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Individuals in the Criminal Justice System Independent Review, what the average sentence was for people convicted of grievous bodily harm with intent by (a) Crown Court and (b) the defendant’s (i) gender, (ii) ethnicity, and (iii) age in each of the last five years.
Answered by Edward Argar - Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
The Ministry of Justice publishes information from 2010 to 2022 on the number of defendants prosecuted, convicted and sentenced for offences under Section 18 of Offences Against the Person Act 1861 (offence code 00501), in the ‘Outcomes by Offence’ data tool.
The attached tables provide a breakdown of average custodial sentence length (ACSL) for defendants sentenced for the offence contrary to Section 18 of the Offences Against Person Act 1861 (causing grievous bodily harm with intent) within the last three years, where it has been treated as a principal offence by Crown Court (table 1), and in all courts by information on gender (table 2), ethnicity (table 3), and age (table 4).
Detailed offence data at Crown Court are only available in the Court Proceedings Database from 2020 onwards. Therefore, figures for all tables have been limited to 2020 onwards in order to give a complete view of each year presented.
Asked by: Alex Cunningham (Labour - Stockton North)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether all work required to implement recommendation 12 of the Lammy Review has been completed.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
We welcomed the Lammy Review in 2017 and committed to taking actions against each of the recommendations from the Review, bar the two for the independent judiciary. Where a recommendation could not be implemented exactly as set out, alternative approaches were sought to tackle the same issue. Now, almost all of the actions we originally committed have been carried out.
Recommendation 12 of the Review states that “the Open Justice initiative should be extended and updated so that it is possible to view sentences for individual offences at individual courts, broken down by demographic characteristics, including gender and ethnicity”.
Since 2017, as we committed to, we have been increasing the availability of demographic data on our justice system users. Experts can now access more detailed data, including on ethnicity and other protected characteristics, through our pioneering data-linking programme Data First. This is providing new insights in a way that has not been possible before, by linking data from across the justice system and making it available for independent academic research. The Data First datasets provide detailed information on defendants and their outcomes, enabling new research exploring sentencing and case outcomes, broken down by demographic characteristics, including ethnicity and gender.
Outside of this programme court outcomes for individual offences and protected characteristics are publicly available and can be found in the Criminal Justice Statistics quarterly. This publication produces tools on an annual basis by demographic characteristics, offence information, and by Police Force Area. Currently, data for individual courts can be produced upon request, and we are exploring ways to develop these data further, balancing user needs and accessibility.