Rape: Trials
(asked on 1st September 2023) - View Source
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what the average waiting time was for a rape trial to begin in each year since 2010.
The average waiting times of defendants dealt with in rape trial cases where a not guilty plea was entered in the Crown Court can be found in the below table with annual data from 2014 to 2022. Data prior to 2014 is not available.
Year | Average waiting times (weeks) of defendants dealt with in rape trial cases where a not guilty plea was entered in the Crown Court | |
Median | Mean | |
2014 | 27.6 | 29.5 |
2015 | 28.9 | 31.8 |
2016 | 28.0 | 30.9 |
2017 | 28.8 | 31.5 |
2018 | 29.6 | 32.9 |
2019 | 26.7 | 30.1 |
2020 | 30.6 | 32.4 |
2021 | 41.0 | 44.8 |
2022 | 39.7 | 44.4 |
Notes:
- Waiting time refers to the time between the date of sending a case to the Crown Court and the start of the substantive Crown Court hearing.
- The number of defendants relate to defendants in the cases that were disposed of in the reporting period.
- Only one offence is counted for each defendant in the case. If there is more than one offence per defendant that complete on the same day, a set of validation rules applies to select one offence only and these relate to the longest duration, seriousness and the lowest sequence number of the offence.
Despite recent setbacks caused by the pandemic and the criminal barrister strike, we continue to make significant investments that will support the reduction of the caseload in its totality.