Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps his Department is taking to improve the timeliness of processing criminal court cases.

The Government is committed to supporting recovery and improving timeliness across the court system. Over the next three financial years, we are investing an extra £477 million for the Criminal Justice System to help improve waiting times for victims of crime and reduce the Crown Court backlog to an estimated 53,000 cases by March 2025.

The outstanding caseload in the Crown Court has reduced from around 60,700 cases in June 2021 to around 58,300 cases at the end of April 2022.

By the end of March 2023, we expect to get through 20% more Crown Court cases than we did pre-Covid (117,000 in 2022/23 compared to 97,000 in 2019/20).

We have expanded the capacity of the Crown Court so that we are able to hear more cases. We have extended 30 Nightingale courtrooms beyond the end of March 2022, including 22 Crown courtrooms. We have also opened two new ‘super courtrooms’ in Manchester and Loughborough, allowing up to an extra 250 cases a year to be heard across England and Wales.

We have once again removed the limit on sitting days in the Crown Court for this financial year to allow courts to work at full capacity, delivering swifter justice for victims and reducing the backlog of cases.

We are expanding our plans for judicial recruitment to secure enough capacity to sit at the required levels in 2022/2023 and beyond.

We have published the Criminal Justice Delivery Data Dashboard which brings together local and national data from across the system on key priority areas to increase transparency, increase understanding of the justice system and support collaboration, particularly at a local level.

The dashboard measures progress against priority areas such as improving timeliness, increasing victim engagement and improving the quality of justice. For the adult rape dashboard, we also measure progress against the Rape Review ambition to more than double the number of adult rape cases reaching the court by the end of Parliament.

We are also implementing our Court Reform programme, which aims to make our court processes more efficient, meaning we can get through more cases in fewer sitting days.