Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to reduce the backlog of court cases in Bury South constituency.

We are pursuing a number of measures at a national level that will contribute to the reduction of cases in the Bury South constituency, to tackle the outstanding caseload across all jurisdictions.

Over 90% of all criminal cases are heard at the magistrates’ court, where we heard 100,000 cases a month on average across 2023. While the outstanding caseload in the magistrates’ courts has slightly increased in recent months due to an increase in the number of cases coming to court, the caseload remains well below its pandemic peak and stood at 353,900 at the end of September 2023, and cases continue to be progressed quickly.

To aid our efforts in the magistrates’ courts, we have invested over £1 million in a programme of work to support the recruitment of new magistrates, and launched a new marketing campaign to target a more diverse pool of potential magistrates and raise the overall profile of the magistracy.

At the Crown Court, we remain committed to reducing the outstanding caseload.

We have introduced a raft of measures to achieve this aim. We are on course to deliver over 100,000 sitting days this year for the third financial year running, alongside recruiting more than 1,000 judges across all jurisdictions.

Judges have worked tirelessly to complete more cases, with disposals up by 9% during Q3 in 2023 compared to Q4 in 2022 (25,700 compared to 23,700). However, an increase in cases coming before the Crown Court throughout 2023 has caused the outstanding caseload to increase, and it stood at 66,500 at the end of September 2023.

Data on the outstanding caseload at Crown Court centre level is published by the Ministry of Justice on a quarterly basis. Receipts, disposals and the outstanding caseload for individual Crown Court centres can be found at: Criminal court statistics quarterly: July to September 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

We are also investing more in our criminal courts. In August 2023, we announced we are investing £220 million for essential modernisation and repair work of our court buildings across the next two years, up to March 2025.

In the Family Court, we are working closely with system partners to drive forward a cross-cutting programme of work to address delays and inefficiencies in the system and to ensure cases are ready to be heard when they reach court.

We are committed to meeting the 26-week statutory requirement for public law cases, and the Government is investing an extra £10 million to develop new initiatives to support this.

In addition, we remain committed to supporting more families to reach agreement on their children and finance arrangements earlier and, where appropriate, without court involvement. As of February 2024, over 25,400 families have successfully used the Family Mediation Voucher Scheme to attempt to resolve their disputes outside of court. We are investing up to £23.6 million, which we intend will allow for its continuation up to March 2025.

With regards to civil cases, we are taking action to ensure those that do need to go to trial are dealt with quickly. We have launched the biggest ever judicial recruitment drive for District Judges, are digitising court processes and holding more remote hearings, and are increasing the use of mediation.

We announced in July 2023 that we would introduce a requirement for small claims in the county court to attend a mediation session with the Small Claims Mediation Service, starting with specified money claims. This requirement will start in the spring and is expected to help parties resolve their dispute swiftly and consensually without the need for a judicial hearing.

With regards to tribunals, we continue to work with the Department for Business and Trade on further measures to address caseloads in the Employment Tribunal, where the deployment of legal officers, recruitment of additional judges and a new electronic case management system have already contributed to the caseload falling and remaining below its pandemic peak.

We are working on completing the programme of reform in the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal, and the judiciary have recently introduced a virtual region pilot to provide additional judicial capacity and flexibility in how appeals are heard and disposed of.