Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many people were litigants in person in England and Wales in each of the last five years in (a) civil and (b) criminal cases.
The Department publishes County Court, Family Court and Crown Court figures on defendants or parties with no (or unknown) representation. This data does not represent the number of litigants in person, however, because a party may be without representation for only part of a case or may be entitled to legal help but not full representation. Information on unrepresented defendants in Magistrates Courts is not held centrally.
Data on the number of parties with and without representation in cases with at least one hearing is published in Table 9 in the Family Court Statistics Quarterly, and trend analysis since 2011 is also given. The latest edition is available at:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/family-court-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2017
Figures on the number of no (or unknown) representation in the Crown Court, including trends since 2010, is published in table AC11 of the annual publication, link below:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-court-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2017
Figures on the number of civil defended claims with and without representation, since 2013, are published in table 1.6 of the quarterly publication, link below:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-justice-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2017