Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, on the basis of what evidence was the estimate of a 20 per cent time saving for judge only trials made, including the following evidence referred to in the Leveson report (i) the quantitative analyses, (ii) the quantitative estimate of impact from the workshop with HMCTS operational staff and (iii) a summary of judicial expectations of time saving; and what is the confidence interval for the 20 per cent estimate.

Hearing cases without a jury negates the need for jury selection, judges explaining legal concepts to jurors, and jury deliberation. There is no denying that these add to the time it takes to hear a case.

The latest figures show offences heard by magistrates already complete more than four times faster than similar cases in the Crown Court.

In Part I of the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts, Sir Brian Leveson, one of the foremost judges of his generation, and his Expert Advisers have estimated a new Crown Court bench division would speed up cases by at least 20%. Sir Brian himself has indicated that he believes this was a conservative estimate and could be significantly more in practice.

Further details of the work undertaken to arrive at this assumption can be found below:

• Quantitative analyses explored potential proxies for jury trial savings by drawing comparisons within the current system. Whilst there is no directly comparable proxy for judge only trials within our own systems, this provided a framework for elicitation workshops and judicial engagement.

• A structured elicitation workshop with expert operational staff from HMCTS. The quantitative analysis was shared with participants, and the workshop generated a suggested estimated range of 10-30% for lower to upper end plausible time savings, with 20% given as a median value.

• Engagement session with judges to understand their personal expectations of potential time-savings, intended to provide an anecdotal indication of where and how the judiciary thought time savings may or may not become apparent in a CCBD. Their views were in keeping with wider estimates.

The 20% assumption is also broadly in line with international evidence from New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research who compared quantitative data from judge only and jury trials. Whilst time savings varied by offence type, for all offences it found a 16% reduction in trial length for judge only trials, and a 29% time saving for complex and prejudicial offences.

A full Impact Assessment of the policy measures announced will be published alongside legislation as is usual.

We will continue to monitor conviction rates and sentencing outcomes as part of our ongoing assessments of the criminal justice system.