Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many criminal court trials have been cancelled as a result of the withdrawal of support for prosecutions by victims in (a) 2017, (b) 2018, (c) 2019, (d) 2020 and (e) 2021 to date; and how many of those trials had been pending for (a) 0 to 12 months, (b) 12 to 24 months, (c) 24 to 36 months or (d) longer than 36 months at the point of cancellation, in each of those years.

Data on the number of cracked trials (those that are cancelled without needing to be rearranged) is published in our Criminal Court datasets trials tool available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics and shows a range of reasons why cases crack, including where the prosecution end the case due to the witness being absent or withdrawing.

Waiting times can also be found in the above link. However, it is not possible to estimate the duration of ‘waiting time’ for cracked trials by specific reasons from the data centrally collated by the Ministry of Justice. To do so would incur disproportionate costs.