Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many and what proportion of trials for young adult defendants aged 18 to 25 years have taken place in (a) Magistrates courts and (b) Crown courts in each of the last five years.

The number of effective¹ trials in the Crown Court for young adult defendants aged 18-25 in the last five years is set out below. The information requested in relation to magistrates’ courts trials for young adult defendants could only be obtained at disproportionate cost. This is because whilst the data held on the HMCTS management information systems contains manually collated data on trial volumes for adult and youth cases, it does not collect data for the specific banding of those aged between 18-25.

For trials in the Crown Court, where the main defendant is in the age group 18-25, the number of effective trials has consistently fallen over the time period from 4,804 trials between October 2015 and September 2016 down 71% to 1,380 trials in the year ending September 2020. This is in line with national figures for all age groups in the same time period where the number of effective trials fell 70% from 18,967 to 5,726.

As it is not possible to provide numbers of young adult trials for the magistrates’ courts, it is therefore not possible to provide the proportion of Crown Court trials as a proportion of all effective trials for 18-25 year olds.

For the 18-25 age range, we would need to extract data on every hearing or disposal and calculate the age by using the date of birth and compare against the date of offence. This would allow us to manually calculate the number of 18-25 year olds as there is not a specific band for this.

1. A breakdown of the total number of trials listed during the reporting period indicated. Not all cases will go to trial, for the purposes of trial effectiveness we consider a ‘trial’ at the point of initial listing. A trial which goes ahead on the planned date and occurs is then considered as ‘effective’. A trial that is listed but does not go ahead is considered either cracked, ineffective or vacated as detailed in the supporting guidance document which is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics.
2. Estimates for Oct 2019 - Sep 2020 exclude a small number of cases which have transitioned to the Common Platform system in the early adopter site (Derby Crown Court).
3. Age is calculated as the age of the main defendant at trial when the case was initially received.