Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many Crown court sitting days there were in each of the last 10 years.

The table below is comprised of unpublished management information sourced from internal reports belonging to Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunal Service (HMCTS) and provides the number of Crown Court sitting days there were in each of the last available 10 financial years:

Sitting days are based on the number of cases we expect the court to hear and, with fewer cases making it to the Crown Court, were reduced to allow judges to carry out work in the civil and family courts, where demand is higher. This approach has enabled us to reduce the number of outstanding Crown Court cases by almost 40% since 2014.

We keep sitting days under constant review and in November allocated an extra 700 days to the Crown Court for this financial year, in response to an increase in cases coming to court.

Notes:

• The above data covers the number of days in which a Crown Court room was sat by any number of judges.
• In some circumstances, judges will ‘share’ a courtroom to conduct judicial business; in most instances this will involve a returning judge for sentencing purposes only. These figures may therefore differ from the number of judicial sitting days at Crown Court as published in MoJ official statistics (which can, for example, also include days sat in chambers).