Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many recorder hours were (a) sat in each month of 2019 and (b) are expected to be sat in 2020.

We hold data in terms of ‘sitting days’ rather than hours.

(a) The official statistics for judge sitting days (tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2019) were withdrawn on 5 September 2019, due to data discrepancies that were discovered after publication on 6 June 2019 and deemed potentially misleading to users. These discrepancies remain under investigation and, in line with the Code of Practice on Statistics, the Chief Statistician and Head of Profession decided to withdraw these tables until the investigations were complete. The revised figures will be published in due course, and will provide the total sitting days in Family, Civil and Crown courts.

(b) We have not been provided with sitting day allocations for financial year 2020/21, but expect that all Recorders will be offered sufficient days to maintain and build up their skills and experience.