Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate his Department has made of the average waiting time between charge and trial in a) magistrates’ courts and b) the Crown Court.

Whilst data is not routinely published for the period from charge to trial start (i.e. the main hearing for defendants entering a not guilty plea), a bespoke breakdown of the Crown Court ‘End-to-end timeliness tool’ shows that the mean time from charge to trial start in 2025 was 433 days, with a corresponding median of 336 days.

A comparable metric is not available in the magistrates’ courts.