Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what proportion of outstanding criminal court cases concern (a) sexual offences, disaggregated by case type and (b) hate crime, disaggregated by protected characteristic strand, as of 1 December 2021.

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has published information on the number of outstanding criminal court cases as part of the National Statistics release ‘Criminal court statistics quarterly’.

The data is available by case type and offence group for Crown Court cases as part of the ‘Crown Court cases received, disposed and outstanding tool’ – with the latest data available to June 2021. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/criminal-court-statistics-quarterly-april-to-june-2021

At the end of June 2021 there were 6,429 outstanding sexual offence cases at the Crown Court. This represents an increase of 54% on the previous year (Q2 2020). Data to the end of December 2021 is provisionally intended for publication on 31^st March 2022.

It is not possible to separate this for hate crime. Hate crimes are usually prosecuted under the specific offence in legislation that they fall under, and the ‘hate’ element is an aggravating factor in that crime rather than the offence itself. Court data held in the department does not separately identify these.