Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the average time for a criminal case to be heard in court without a Section 28 video recording.

HM Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) does not hold information on the average time for a criminal case to be heard in court without via Section 28 video recording.

Data provide by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) shows for all cases disposed in the Crown Court that were received between 2020-01-01 and 2022-12-31 and the defendant plead ‘not guilty’, the median time between receipt and the main hearing was 280 days for cases without any Section 28. For the same cases, the median time between the receipt and the completion of the case was 372 days where there was no use of Section 28.

The figures supplied have been produced via experimental data matching based partly on live operational systems. Whilst every effort is made to ensure that figures provided are accurate and complete, they have not been verified to the same standards as National Statistics and may not exactly match the equivalent data in the Criminal Court Statistics publication.