Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many Crown court sitting days there were in each month of (a) 2017, (b) 2018 and (c) 2019.

The number of days sat in the Crown Court for each month of (a) 2017, (b) 2018, and (c) 2019 are set out in the attached spreadsheet.

Sitting days are based on the number of cases we expect the court to hear and, with fewer cases making it to the Crown Court, were reduced accordingly.The number of outstanding Crown Court cases has reduced by almost 40% since 2014.

We keep sitting days under constant review and in November allocated an extra 850 days to the Crown Court for this financial year to ease immediate pressure on the court.We have allocated a minimum of 87,000 to inform listing decisions in the first half of 2020/21 which is an increase of 4,700 on last year’s allocation.

Notes:

• The attached HMCTS data covers the number of days in which a Crown Court room was sat by any number of judges.

• In some circumstances, judges will ‘share’ a courtroom to conduct judicial business; in most instances this will involve a returning judge for sentencing purposes only. These figures may therefore differ from the number of judicial sitting days at Crown Court as published in MoJ official statistics (which can, for example, also include days sat in chambers).

The information for 2019 covers January to March, as the National Statistics on judge sitting days for 2019 are due to be released in June 2020. Access to statistics before their publication is strictly controlled, with rules and principles on pre-release access set out in the Pre-release Access to Official Statistics Order 2008.