Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the Answer of 4 November 2019 to Question 7113 on Prosecutions, what proportion of trials were cracked on the first day of the trial in each month in (a) 2019, (b) 2018 and (c) 2010.

The Ministry of Justice publishes annual and quarterly data on cracked trials in England and Wales, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-court-statistics-quarterly-july-to-september-2019.

In these statistics a cracked trial is defined as: “a trial which does not commence on the scheduled date and the trial is not rescheduled, as it is no longer required. Cracked trials are usually the result of an acceptable guilty plea being entered by the defendant on the day or the case ending as the prosecution decides not to proceed (offers no evidence) against the defendant.”

It is not possible to separately identify if the trial was cracked on the day of trial or at any prior point from the data centrally collated by the Ministry of Justice. As a result, identifying the proportion of trials that were ‘cracked on the first day of the trial’ would require a search of court records, which would be of disproportionate cost.