Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what comparative information his Department holds on the number of cases going through the Crown Court in the (a) 2020-21 and (b) 2011-12 financial years. .

The latest published criminal court statistics can be found at www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics.

Data relating to Q4 2020 will be published on 24 March 2021, and data covering Q1 2021 will be published on 24 June 2021.The table below provides data from the latest 12 month period and the corresponding 12 month period 2011 and the total number of cases for the 2011/2012 financial year.

The above are estimates of receipts¹, disposals² and outstanding³ cases in the Crown Court in England and Wales, January 2011 to December 2011 (inclusive), 2011-12 financial year, January 2020 to December 2020 (inclusive) and February 2020 to January 2021(inclusive, latest available).

Notes:

1) Receipts include cases sent direct from magistrates' courts and cases transferred in.

2) Disposals include cases where a disposal is recorded against each defendant and all their offences; and cases that are transferred out.

3) The outstanding case estimate is a cumulative count of ongoing cases within the Crown Court which have not reached disposal. It is not the number of receipts minus disposals due to exclusions made to the data. The outstanding estimates exclude cases which have a bench warrant issued – e.g. where a defendant cannot be bought before the court and the police have been directed to arrest them in order to bring them before the court as required. Once the bench warrant is executed and the individual is brought back before the court, the case will then form part of the outstanding case counts again.

4) Estimates for Q3 2020 exclude a small number of cases which have transitioned to the Common Platform system in the early adopter site (Derby Crown Court) from September 2020.