Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many litigants in person there were in (a) crown courts, (b) family courts and (c) county courts in each court area in Wales in (i) 2013, (ii) 2014, (iii) 2015, (iv) 2016, (v) 2017, (vi) 2018 and (vii) 2019.

This information is not held centrally and would require reviewing individual court files in each year specified. The requested information could only be obtained at disproportionate cost. However, self-representation in criminal, civil and family cases is identified in HMCTS case management systems by the legal representation field being left blank. These figures should therefore be considered as counting parties without a recorded representative, and are not necessarily self-representing litigants in person.

Access to justice is a central pillar of society, which is why we spent around £1.7 billion on legal aid last year. We have also committed a further £5 million on innovative technologies to enable access to legal support at the earliest opportunity.

We are improving the Exceptional Case Funding scheme, reviewing legal aid means testing, and will launch an awareness campaign to ensure even more people know what support they are entitled to.

Notes to accompany release of data:

1. Family and county court data for 2019 is available at present only for the period January 2019 until September 2019.

2. County court data is for cases where claims were defended. The data represents defended cases where there was a claimant only represented, defendant only represented or neither claimants or defendants were represented. Please note: it cannot be assumed that each defended claim has only one claimant and defendant.

3. In both the family and county court, some cases involve more than one applicant/claimant or respondent/defendant. As such there are more applicants and respondents than there are cases.

4. Please note, the Crown Court data includes both defendants who did not have an advocate recorded at all hearings and defendants whose advocate representation was unknown. It is not necessarily the case that someone whose representation was unknown, did not have representation.