Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many cases were cracked in (a) Crown courts and (b) Magistrates' courts in each month of 2019.

The information requested about how many cracked cases there have been in each month in 2019:

Please find attached tables providing:

- Number of cracked trials at the magistrates’ court and Crown Court in England and Wales in each month in 2019.

1) The total number of cracked trials listed during the reporting period indicate

2) Cracked trial is a trial that does not go ahead on the day as an outcome is reached and so does not need to be re-scheduled. This occurs when an acceptable plea is offered by the defendant or the prosecution offers no evidence against the defendant.

3) Latest published data available to September 2019.

Source: Criminal Court Statistics (PQ 3718)

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.