Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what support has been provided to reduce the backlog of criminal cases in (a) Leicester Crown Court and (b) the Midlands.

The Government is committed to supporting the recovery of the courts. We recognise that the impact of the pandemic in courts has been uneven across the country, with the Midlands being one of the areas experiencing a greater increase in caseload.

In order to tackle the backlogs, we have extended 30 Nightingale courtrooms beyond the end of March 2022. Two of these are in the Midlands, Park Hall Hotel in Wolverhampton and Maple House in Birmingham. We are also working with the judiciary to explore moving cases across regional boundaries to areas with spare capacity, where appropriate, and using a national, flexible pool of judges for some regions, including the Midlands, to draw from as required.

We opened a new ‘super courtroom’ in Loughborough to expand capacity for multi-hander cases, which involve three or more defendants, that have built up during the pandemic as they were harder to hear with social distancing measures in place. This ‘super courtroom’ will create the space needed to hear trials and free up capacity elsewhere in Leicestershire and the Midlands, allowing up to an extra 250 cases a year to be heard across England and Wales.

We have once again removed the limit on sitting days in the Crown Court for this financial year to allow courts to work at full capacity, delivering swifter justice for victims and reducing the backlog of cases. To secure enough capacity to sit at the required levels in 2022/23 and beyond we are expanding our plans for judicial recruitment.

To provide additional capacity in the Crown Court we are extending magistrates’ court sentencing powers from 6 to 12 months’ imprisonment for a single Triable either Way offence to allow more cases to be heard in the magistrates’ court and help to drive down the backlog of cases over the coming years.

These measures are already working, and as a result we expect to get through 20% more Crown Court cases this financial year than we did pre-Covid. Following an increase in funding as part of the Ministry of Justice’s Spending Review settlement, we aim to reduce the number of outstanding cases in the Crown Court to 53,000 by March 2025.