Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many cases of covid-19 have been confirmed among the (a) staff, (b) judiciary, (c) jurors and (d) users of each court from 21 January 2021 to the most recent day for which that information is available.

We follow all Public Health and Government COVID-secure guidelines and have put measures in place to keep all court and tribunal users safe. When Government or Public Health guidance changes our measures are updated, an approach which is endorsed by Public Health England and Public Health Wales.

The table below sets out the number of new confirmed COVID-19 cases reported to HMCTS among (a) staff, (b) judiciary, (c) jurors and (d) users between 21 January 2021 and 26 January 2021. The positive test data after the 26 January 2021 will be artificially low, due to the time taken for individuals to take a test, receive test results, and then communicate this to HMCTS (which is then recorded against the date initially reported). The table only includes court locations within the HMCTS estate where we have learnt about a new positive case within the dates given above. All other court sites have not reported any new cases between these dates. There should be no assumption that a positive case indicates that there has been transmission within a court building.

HMCTS employs around 19,800 staff (payroll and non-payroll). There are around 19,400 judicial office holders covering all jurisdictions, including coroners and magistrates. The population of jurors fluctuates each week, but we estimate around 4,000 jurors attend weekly.

For staff and agency staff in HMCTS as a whole (including tribunals), positive test rates are falling in line with national numbers. For the 7 days prior to the 26 January 2021, staff rates including tribunals were at 361.7 per 100,000 against a national figure of 288 (378.9 in London).

Comparability with national statistics will be affected by our staff locations (staff are not evenly distributed across the country) and when the numbers are changing rapidly the difference between incident date (our figures) and date of positive test (national figures) becomes relevant. However, overall, the trend is not dissimilar to national averages time.

Note that courts without any confirmed positive cases in the time period are not listed.