Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether her Department’s data cleanse of the magistrates’ court data will (a) help with listing, (b) benefit other court processes and (c) improve the accuracy of the statistics.

In June and September 2024, the Ministry of Justice made the decision to cancel publication of the quarterly Official Accredited statistics on the criminal courts, following concerns about the quality of criminal court performance data.

That initial work highlighted some necessary changes to court processing systems to enable robust and accurate data to be produced. These fixes do not affect the operation of the courts and are purely an issue for the data reporting.

Despite these data issues, we know that the Crown Court outstanding caseload has been increasing in the last 6 months, and remains one of the biggest pressures facing the criminal justice system.

These data fixes are being implemented alongside work to align the Ministry of Justice Official Accredited statistics and HMCTS management information methodologies. This will benefit users by providing greater transparency and coherence in court data.

Publishing accurate statistics for our criminal courts is vital for public confidence in the justice system. I recognise that the prolonged absence of timely and accurate data is an unsatisfactory position. This work is a departmental priority and, is underway to deliver an updated data series (including those missing quarters) as soon as possible when we are confident it meets the required level of accuracy. The Government looks forward to updating the House on the action we are taking soon.