Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the open caseload was for the Crown Court in England and Wales at the start of each month since June 2024.

The Crown Court outstanding caseload remains one of the biggest challenges facing the Criminal Justice System. The caseload has risen substantially over recent years due to the pandemic and a substantial increase in the number of cases coming to court. The latest published data shows that the outstanding caseload stood at 76,957 at the end of March 2025.

For this financial year (25/26), this Government is funding a record allocation of Crown Court sitting days to deliver swifter justice for victims – 110,000 sitting days next year, 4,000 higher than the last Government funded. We also funded 108,500 sitting days in the Crown Court in the last financial year - the highest level in almost 10 years (since FY15/16).

However, the scale of the challenge is beyond what increasing sitting days can achieve. That is why the Government asked Sir Brian Leveson to chair an Independent Review of Criminal Courts, to propose once-in-a-generation reform that will improve timeliness in the courts and deliver swifter justice for victims. The first part of the Review now been published. We will carefully consider Sir Brian’s proposals before setting out the Government’s full response in the autumn.

The number of open Crown Court cases at the end of each quarter is published in Table_C1 of the Criminal Court Statistics quarterly release: Criminal court statistics Q1 2025. Data have been published up to the end of March 2025.

A monthly breakdown, as requested from June 2024 to March 2025 is provided below. We extract data for the end of the month rather than the start of each month, so we have provided month end figures in the table below.