Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many active magistrates in England were sitting each year between 2005 and 2015.

The annual figures, as calculated at the end of the financial year, for the number of serving magistrates, for each year between 2005 and 2015, are given in the table below. Although magistrates are generally assigned to one local bench, they have jurisdiction to sit across England and Wales and, as a result, we can only show figures for the two countries combined.

The downturn in the number of magistrates, and the recruitment of new magistrates, are a natural consequence of falling workloads in the magistrates’ courts, due to falling crime and increased use of out of court disposals.