Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the time required to clear the backlog of Court cases.

Data relating to receipts, disposals, outstanding caseload and the timeliness of cases across a number of jurisdictions can be found in our latest published statistics at weekly management information page. You can also view our recovery plans for the criminal, civil and family courts as well as the tribunals at Court and Tribunal recovery update and our Crime recovery update for further details on how we are working to clear the backlog.

Despite the changing nature of the pandemic, we are working hard to ensure that courts and tribunals remain ‘COVID safe’ so that both face to face and remote hearings can proceed as expected. Despite ongoing restrictions, we’re continuing to safely increase court and tribunal capacity through measures such as Nightingale Courts, installing plexiglass screens to enable and increase jury trial capacity and using the Cloud Video Platform (CVP) for remote hearings.