Crown Court

(asked on 30th January 2020) - View Source

Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many Crown court sitting days there were in each of the court circuits in England and Wales in (a) 2017, (b) 2018 and (c) 2019.


Answered by
Chris Philp Portrait
Chris Philp
Minister of State (Home Office)
This question was answered on 4th February 2020

The number of days sat in the Crown Court for each of the court circuits in England and Wales in (a) 2017, (b) 2018 and (c) 2019 are set out in the attached spreadsheet.

Sitting days are based on the number of cases we expect the court to hear and, with fewer cases making it to the Crown Court, were reduced accordingly. The number of outstanding Crown Court cases has reduced by almost 40% since 2014.

We keep sitting days under constant review and in November allocated an extra 850 days to the Crown Court to ease immediate pressure on the court. We have allocated a minimum of 87,000 to inform listing decisions in the first half of 2020/21 which is an increase of 4,700 on last year’s allocation.

Notes:

  • The attached HMCTS data covers the number of days in which a Crown Court room was sat by any number of judges.

  • In some circumstances, judges will ‘share’ a courtroom to conduct judicial business; in most instances this will involve a returning judge for sentencing purposes only. These figures may therefore differ from the number of judicial sitting days at Crown Court as published in MoJ official statistics (which can, for example, also include days sat in chambers).

The information for 2019 covers January to March, as the National Statistics on judge sitting days for 2019 are due to be released in June 2020. Access to statistics before their publication is strictly controlled, with rules and principles on pre-release access set out in the Pre-release Access to Official Statistics Order 2008.

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