Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many sitting days in courts were presided over by a recorder in (a) England, (b) Greater London and (c) Greater Manchester in (i) each of the last three financial years and (ii) the 2019-20 financial year.

The number of sittings days sat by recorders in the last three financial years in the requested locations are set out in the table below. These figures cover sitting days by recorders in County, Family and Crown Courts.

¹ Note these figures are only for nine months as opposed to the twelve months in the columns for 2016/17 and 2017/18. This is because the latest published data only runs to December 2018 and under the Code of Practice for Official Statistics we cannot provide any more recent data until that data (covering 2019) has been published. The data for 2019 will be published in June 2020.

The latest published data is available here. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-justice-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2019. It is part of the Royal Courts of Justice Annual Tables (which contain at Table 5.2 a breakdown of sitting days by type of work and level of judge)

The data source for these figures are a number of operational systems and as such are liable to change and may not reflect previously published statistics.

Last year Crown Court trial waiting times were at their lowest since 2014, with this year’s allocation of sitting days reflecting this.