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 in each year since 2020, broken down by (a) offence, and (b) police force.

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. We are unable to exclude cases from our timeliness data that are exempt from the time limit and cases that have been reopened.

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.