Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate he has made of the number of murder trials in England and Wales that have been postponed within (a) 24 hours' notice, (b) 48 hours notice and (c) less than one week's notice in each year since 2010.

A trial which will no longer take place on the date set aside for it in the court calendar is referred to as a ‘vacated’ trial. This usually happens when one or both parties is not ready to proceed and there is agreement between them that an adjournment would be in order.

The table below sets out the data held by HMCTS for trials in the Crown Court for the offence of murder which have been vacated within 24 hours, 48 hours and 1 week of the trial date since 2015.

Although care is taken when processing and analysing the data, the details are subject to inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale case management system and is the best data that is available.

Data are taken from a live management information system and can change over time.

Information on the number of trials vacated within 24, 48 and 1 week of the trial are not available prior to 2015.

Trials vacated because either the prosecution discontinued the case before the trial date or where the defendant changed their plea to guilty to the original charge have been excluded since there was no further need for a trial. If a trial date was vacated more than once in the same year it has been counted for each time.