Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many cases exceeded the statutory time limit of six months for summary offences because of misclassification in each year since 2020.

The Ministry of Justice does not hold data on the number of cases that exceeded the statutory time limit of six months for summary offences. This is because we are unable to identify all cases that exceed six months that would be exempt from the statutory time limits in our caseload data.

Timeliness estimates from offence to charge for defendants dealt with in summary only cases at the magistrates’ courts are available in Table T3 of the published Criminal Courts Statistics release available at the following link:  Criminal court statistics - GOV.UK.