Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the (a) total number of sex crime cases waiting to go to trial and (b) waiting time for sex crime cases to go to trial in England as of 26 October 2021; and what comparative assessment he has made of those figures with the number of cases and waiting times in each of the last 5 years.

The table below shows the average outstanding time in days in the Crown Court for sexual offence 'for trial' cases in England, from June 2017 to June 2021 (the latest available MoJ data).^1,2,3

Data up to 26 October 2021 is not currently available.

Notes:

1) Outstanding time refers to the time, measured in days, between the receipt of a case in a specific Crown Court and the end of the reporting period, for example counts presented for 2021 relate to cases which are open as at the end of June 2021.

2) For trial' cases relates to the case type at the point of receipt into the Crown Court - we know that most of these cases will result in the entry of a guilty plea and that only a minority will require a trial.

3) Outstanding cases excludes cases that have a live bench warrant issued on the case, at the end of the period. The number of cases outstanding at the end of each period will not be equal to the sum of cases outstanding at the start of the period and those received during the period, minus cases disposed due to the exclusion of cases that have a live bench warrant issued on the case.

4) Median here relates to the 50th percentile.

5) Outstanding caseloads presented here excludes cases which have been recorded on the new case management system ('Common Platform') which has been rolled across England and Wales since September 2020. This is estimated to represent around 2% of the total outstanding sexual offence 'for trial' cases in England for the latest reporting period to June 2021.