Source · Select Committees · Justice Committee
Recommendation 13
13
Deferred
Paragraph: 43
Publish monthly Crown Court trial targets and a roadmap for outstanding case reduction.
Recommendation
The recovery in the Crown Court will depend on the ability of the courts to dispose of a significantly higher average number of trials each month. While we recognise the difficulties of setting prescriptive targets. While we recognise the difficulties of setting prescriptive targets, the Government should set out the number of Crown Court trials that will need to be disposed of each month in order to deliver the reduction in the number of outstanding cases to reach its target of 53,000 by March 2025, and complement this with a detailed roadmap for achieving this.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government did not provide monthly Crown Court trial targets or a roadmap for reducing outstanding cases. Instead, it detailed the rollout of Section 28 for sexual and modern slavery offences, including monitoring its effects and publishing interim evaluation findings in the autumn.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
43
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government · verbatim extract
Deferred
While trial disposals take up the majority of Crown Court time, they only represent a minority of total disposals – the total figure includes cases for trial where the defendant pleads guilty or the case is dropped by the prosecution, committals for sentence from the magistrates’ courts, and appeals against magistrates’ decisions. The balance of types of cases in the outstanding caseload has changed over the last two years, as some jury trials were particularly difficult to schedule. This change in case mix will therefore change the time taken to dispose of the same number of cases, as jury trials take more hearing time to dispose of than other types of cases. Over the next three financial years, we are investing an extra £477 million for the Criminal Justice system to help improve waiting times for victims of crime and reduce the Crown Court backlog to an estimated 53,000 cases by March 2025. Our plan of action includes removing the limit on Crown Court sitting days in 2021/22, expanding our plans for judicial recruitment to secure enough capacity to sit at the required levels in 2022/2023 and beyond, and extending magistrates’ court sentencing powers from maximum 6 to 12 months’ imprisonment for a single Triable Either Way offence to allow us to bring criminals to justice more quickly and relieve some of the strain on the Crown Court. These measures will allow us to reduce the backlog more quickly, ensuring offenders are brought to justice faster and reducing waiting times for victims and witnesses.
Read the full response on Parliament ↗