Parliamentary Search

Written question asked by Katie Lam (Conservative) on Thursday, 9 July 2026, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 13 July 2026. It was answered by Sarah Sackman (Labour) on Friday, 17 July 2026 on behalf of the Ministry of Justice.

Crown Court: Trials

Question

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what was the (a) average length of a trial and (b) average time taken for a case to reach completion following receipt at the Crown Court, broken down by individual Crown Court centre, for each financial year from 2019–20 to 2024–25.

Answer

The Ministry of Justice regularly publishes data on the average amount of time a case spends being heard and the average time taken for a case to reach completion following receipt at the Crown Court, as part of the Criminal Court Statistics Quarterly: Criminal court statistics - GOV.UK

Data on the average amount of time a case spends being heard (in hours) is published in the “Crown Court average waiting and hearing time tool”, which can be filtered by trial type, including jury trial (01. Not guilty plea & 02. Trials total) and region.

Data on the average time taken for a case to reach completion (in days) following receipt at the Crown Court is published in the ‘End-to-end timeliness tool’ (Crown Court) which be filtered by Local Criminal Justice Board (LCJB).

LCJB and region are the lowest available geographic level of our published Accredited Official Statistics for timeliness and hearing time respectively. Our published metrics are produced at a sufficiently 'high' level of geography to reduce the volatility and fluctuations associated with low volumes of cases.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
17589
Session
2026-27
Subjects
Criminal proceedings Crown Court Trials
Contains statistics
Yes
Link
View this Written question on www.parliament.uk