Sexual Offences: Trials

(asked on 18th January 2023) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of rape and sexual offence trials listed as floating hearings in each year since 2010.


Answered by
Edward Argar Portrait
Edward Argar
Minister of State (Ministry of Justice)
This question was answered on 26th January 2023

Decisions about the listing of cases, including decisions about whether any particular hearing should be fixed or floated, are entirely matters for the independent judiciary. Insofar as the Crown Court in England and Wales is concerned, the information requested can be found in the table(s) below:

Floated trials

Year

No. of Rape & Sexual Offence

% of all offence types

2014

97

4%

2015

100

4%

2016

107

4%

2017

116

5%

2018

103

6%

2019

75

4%

2020

57

7%

2021

165

12%

Grand Total

820

5%

Information on trials broken down by offence are not available prior to 2014. Full year data is not yet available for 2022.

During the period 2014 to 2021, 58% of floated trials with rape and/or sexual assault offences were heard on the day and recorded as either effective or cracked trials.

The figures supplied have been extracted from live case management systems and whilst every effort is made to ensure that figures provided are accurate and complete, they have not been verified to the same standards as National Statistics and therefore inevitable limitations should be taken into account as there may be differing approaches as to how courts record their floaters in the daily list.

Reticulating Splines