Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answers of 20 January to Questions 3722 and 3721, whether a timetable has been set by when the correct statistics will be made available for (a) judge and (b) recorder sitting hours; and whether he expects those sitting hours to be less in total than in 2018.

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for judge sitting days (tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2019) were withdrawn on 5 September 2019, due to data discrepancies that were discovered after publication on 6 June 2019 and deemed potentially misleading to users.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 corrected figures will be published in the March 2020 publication if our investigation shows that the corrected figures meet the expected quality standards before then; if the appropriate quality standards cannot be met by then, the correct figures will be published in June 2020. This is the date when 2019 sitting days figures are due to be published as part of the normal publication cycle.

Until these investigations and corrections have been concluded, it is not possible to make a comparison against 2018 data.