Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, on how many days (a) recorders and (b) judges have sat in each month from February 2019 to 2020.

The official statistics for judge sitting days (tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2019) were withdrawn on 5 September 2019, due to data discrepancies that were discovered after publication on 6 June 2019 and deemed potentially misleading to users. These discrepancies remain under independent investigation and, in line with the Code of Practice on Statistics, the Chief Statistician and Head of Profession decided to withdraw these tables until the investigations were complete and a revised set of figures could be compiled.

We plan to publish revised figures on 4 June 2020 that will include annual totals for all judges for 2019. The data for recorders will not be included as corrected figures are not yet available. The monthly data from February 2019 to December 2019 for part (b), for all judges, can be made available after 4 June 2020. The timing for when the equivalent data can be made available for recorders is currently unknown.