Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what estimate she has made of the proportion of magistrates’ court trials listed that did not go ahead on the scheduled day since July 2024; and what the primary recorded reasons were for such delays.

The Ministry of Justice publishes data on the number of ineffective trials at the magistrates’ courts across England and Wales in the “Trial effective in the courts” data tool (latest to December 2024). This can be downloaded from the Criminal Court Statistics landing page here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics.