Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an estimate of the average time taken for theft cases to be completed in court in each year since 2010.

Average timeliness from first listing/receipt at court to completion for theft offences has been provided in the attached table. The table is broken down by court type and year and is a subset of published Criminal Court Statistics (tables T3 and T4): https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-court-statistics-quarterly-july-to-september-2022. Crown Court data is only available from 2014 onwards.

Our decisive action in the courts kept justice moving during the face of an unprecedented pandemic and as a result, the outstanding caseload in the Crown Court reduced from around 60,600 cases in June 2021 to 57,500 cases at the end of March 2022.

However, the caseload increased again from April, primarily due to the Criminal Bar Association action, and stood at 62,500 at the end of October. The caseload is now beginning to decrease and stood at 61,700 at the end of December 2022.

We are expanding our plans for judicial recruitment to secure enough capacity to sit at the maximum level in this financial year and beyond. We have taken decisive steps to improve timeliness by removing the limit on sitting days in the Crown Court for the second financial year in a row, recruiting up to 1,000 judges across all jurisdictions and legislating to give more flexibility to return cases to the Magistrates’ courts.