Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether his Department has set a maximum limit on the amount of time criminal cases should await trial, to act as a target for capping and reducing the increase in waiting times.

In the Crown Court we have seen the outstanding caseload stabilise at around 60,000 cases. The Spending Review provides an extra £477m funding for the criminal justice system. We estimate this will improve waiting times and reduce the number of outstanding cases to 53,000 by March 2025, ensuring that we do right by victims of crime.

While we do not have set targets, we developed the Criminal Justice Action Plan at rapid pace to improve performance of the Criminal Justice System as a whole. The Action Plan defines a set of actions being carried out which intends to improve timeliness of cases throughout the CJS, whilst reducing the outstanding caseload backlog.

Judges continue to work to prioritise cases involving vulnerable complainants and witnesses, to seek to ensure that domestic abuse, serious sex cases and those with vulnerable witnesses (including youth cases) are listed at the first available opportunity. Judges also seek to list cases within their custody time limit, if applicable.

Having the right data across the Criminal Justice System is crucial to recovery. We are committed to working with our partners across the justice system to ensure that it underpins our approach. As part of that, we have committed to publish quarterly Criminal Justice scorecards which will bring together data from across the system on key areas of performance including on timeliness. This will allow us to identify problem areas and take a cross-system response to dips in performance. We have a number of measures to monitor different aspects of timeliness so that we can identify where in the process delays are occurring. The first national scorecards were published in early December and can be viewed at https://data.justice.gov.uk/cjs-scorecard-all-crime.