Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the (a) mean and (b) median number of days taken from offence to completion of criminal cases for (i) Crown and (ii) Magistrates Court in England and Wales, broken down by individual court and region for each of the last three years for which figures are available.

• Please see the attached tables with the mean and median timeliness from offence to completion, as follows:

o Table 1 – Days from offence to completion at Crown Court, by year (the latest available data, broken down by region and Crown Court)

o Table 2 – Days from offence to completion at Magistrates, by year (the latest available data, broken down by region and Local Justice Area (LJA))

The pandemic is the primary cause of the increased caseload in our courts. The outstanding caseload reduced significantly pre-pandemic – from over 55,000 in late 2014 to c.33,000 in late 2018.

• Timeliness from offence to completion is a complex picture as it involves several partners across the Criminal Justice System. The Police and Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have both committed to a programme of work on more efficient case progression, more information on which can be found here: National Case Progression Commitment: College of Policing, National Police Chiefs' Council and Crown Prosecution Service, March 2021 | The Crown Prosecution Service (cps.gov.uk)

• We invested a quarter of a billion pounds to support recovery in the last financial year (20/21); extended 32 Crown Nightingale courtrooms until the end of March 2022; opened two new ‘super courtrooms’ in Manchester and Loughborough; removed the limit on the number of days the Crown Court can sit in the 21/22 financial year, and our rapid roll out of video technology, which equipped over 70 per cent of all courtrooms with the video hardware to use Cloud Video Platform, enabled up to 20,000 cases to be heard virtually each week at the height of the pandemic.

• These measures are working – the backlog in the Crown Court has reduced from around 61,000 cases in June 2021 to around 58,400 cases at the end of December 2021 (Source: HMCTS Monthly MI).

• In the magistrates’ court, the criminal caseload has fallen from 436,000 in June 2020 to 375,700 in December 2021 – a reduction of 14% (Source: HMCTS Monthly MI).

• Looking ahead, as part of the Spending Review, we will be investing £477 million in the Criminal Justice System over the next three years which will allow us to reduce Crown Court backlogs to an estimated 53,000 by March 2025.

• In the next financial year we expect to get through 20% more Crown Court cases than we did pre-Covid (117,000 in 22/23 compared to 97,000 in 19/20).
• We are also extending magistrates’ court sentencing powers from 6 to 12 months for a single Triable Either Way offence to allow more cases to be heard in the magistrates' court.