Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average time taken has been from charge to disposal for youth criminal cases in each of the last 18 months.

The table below shows the average duration (days) from charge to completion for defendants dealt with in youth cases[1] by court type, England and Wales, January 2020 - June 2021 (latest available) [2],[3],[4]

Notes

(1) Where a youth panel sat.

(2) Excludes a small number of cases with identified data quality issues (e.g. no date information recorded), breaches and appeals.

(3) Data linked using probabilistic recording linking ('Splink') methodology - further information of the matching methodology is available at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/joined-up-data-in-government-the-future-of-data-linking-methods/splink-mojs-open-source-library-for-probabilistic-record-linkage-at-scale

(4) Only one offence is counted for each defendant in the case. If there is more than one offence per defendant that complete on the same day, a set of validation rules applies to select one offence only and these relate to the longest duration, seriousness and the lowest sequence number of the offence.

(5) Including all criminal cases which have received a verdict and concluded in the specified time period, in the magistrates' courts (excluding cases sent/committed to the Crown Court).

(6) Including all criminal cases which have received a verdict and concluded in the specified time period in the Crown Court.

(7) Estimates from Q3 2020 exclude cases which have transitioned to the Common Platform system in the early adopter sites from September 2020.

Source: Criminal Court Statistics, Data and Evidence as a Service - Courts and People (PQ 58390)