The annual official Diversity of the Judiciary statistics includes the total numbers of Recorders in post, as of 1 April of the relevant year (Data tables: Tab 3_1_JO_Appt):

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/diversity-of-the-judiciary-2025-statistics.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/diversity-of-the-judiciary-2024-statistics.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/diversity-of-the-judiciary-2023-statistics.

Recorders can be authorised to sit in multiple courts and jurisdictions, and the judiciary is responsible for assigning them to sit in specific Crown or County Courts.

The table below sets out the data held per month for the number of Recorders who hold a live Crime ticket (weekly data is not available) over the 12 months to June 2025, which is the latest month for which the data is available. It also sets out the number of Recorders who sat for at least 1 day in the Crown Court during that same month.

It should be noted that many Recorders will hold multiple tickets, so the Recorders listed here who have not sat in the Crown Court may have been sitting in Family or Civil instead. In addition, Recorders may have other professional obligations which mean that they are not available to sit in a particular month.

The Deputy Prime Minister recently announced an additional 1,250 sitting days in the Crown Court this year, which means the Crown Court will be able to sit for 111,250 days this year, 5,000 more than the days initially allocated last year. This enables the Crown Court to sit more days this year than ever before.

Data on timeliness and ineffective trials (including judge/magistrate availability) at the criminal courts is available here: Criminal court statistics quarterly: January to March 2025 - GOV.UK.

There is no evidence to suggest that judicial vacancies have a significant impact on the timeliness of hearings in the Crown Court.

The Ministry of Justice, working in partnership with HMCTS and the judiciary, continuously monitor judicial capacity across the justice system. We are continuing to invest in regular judicial recruitment of around 1,000 judges and tribunal members each year across all jurisdictions.

There is no evidence that sitting days were lost due to judicial or recorder shortage in the last 12 months.

Recorders are not full time salaried judges, but fee paid, and the number of days they are expected to make themselves available for in a year is set out in their terms and conditions. PQ 93763 covers all those who have a primary appointment as Recorder.

Table 1 shows how many Recorders sat and the total number of days sat by Recorders, in each year between 2015 and 2020. Figures are for England and Wales. Data can only be supplied to December 2020 because the 2021 data are not yet finalised.

Table 1. The number of Recorders who sat, and the total number of Recorder sitting days, England and Wales, 2015 to 2020.

Source: Judicial Itineraries System

We are making use of fee-paid judiciary, including those sitting in retirement. For a second year in a row, we have increased the maximum number of sitting days for all Recorders from 30 to 80 days. This year, our planned recruitment has brought in additional judges since October 2021, which is helping us to further increase our activity for the rest of the financial year.

Notes for the table:

1) These figures represent only the days sat in all courts and chambers (including the Royal Courts of Justice). Recorders undertake a range of other functions outside the courtroom that are not shown here.

2) The data for each Recorder sitting has been extracted from a live system and so is slightly different to the published data on sitting days. This can be found in the Royal Court of Justice sitting days tables: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-justice-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2021

3) Please note the Judicial Itinerary tool, from which each Recorder's sitting day was extracted, was deployed in April 2015 so this data is missing for Jan-Mar 2015. Therefore our 2015 figure only covers Apr to Dec of that year.

4) Only Recorders sitting in the capacity of Recorder are included. Recorders sittings as a Deputy High Court Judge are excluded.

We are continuing to work to maximise capacity across the whole Courts and Tribunals system. Recorders are integral to these plans, playing a key role in ensuring that we deliver as many sitting days as possible in order to provide access to justice. Data relating to sitting days, including recorders will be published in the first half of 2021 as part of the regular Official Statistics relating to Civil Justice.

We are continuing to work to maximise capacity across the whole Courts and Tribunals system. Recorders will play a key role to ensure that we deliver as many sitting days as possible in order to provide access to justice. Data relating to sitting days will be published in the first half of 2021 as part of the regular Official Statistics relating to Civil Justice.

Spend on Recorders is available for the last 5 years, financial year 2015/16 onwards. Historical costs on Recorders prior to this cannot be separately identified in our current reporting system.

*The identifiable costs for Recorders are basic salary. Any associated pension and employer national insurance contributions are reported in totality and Recorder costs cannot be separately identified in our current reporting system.

The official statistics for judge sitting days (tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2019) were withdrawn on 5 September 2019, due to data discrepancies that were discovered after publication on 6 June 2019 and deemed potentially misleading to users. These discrepancies remain under independent investigation and, in line with the Code of Practice on Statistics, the Chief Statistician and Head of Profession decided to withdraw these tables until the investigations were complete and a revised set of figures could be compiled.

We plan to publish revised figures on 4 June 2020 that will include annual totals for all judges for 2019. The data for recorders will not be included as corrected figures are not yet available. The monthly data from February 2019 to December 2019 for part (b), for all judges, can be made available after 4 June 2020. The timing for when the equivalent data can be made available for recorders is currently unknown.

The Judicial Conduct Investigations Office (JCIO) publishes statements, on behalf of the Lord Chancellor and the Lord Chief Justice, about judicial disciplinary cases which have resulted in a sanction on its website at: https://judicialconduct.judiciary.gov.uk/disciplinary-statements/2020/

Additionally, for 2013/14-2018/19, data about judicial office holders subject to disciplinary sanction is available in the JCIO’s annual reports at: https://judicialconduct.judiciary.gov.uk/reports-publications/

The annual reports of the JCIO and its predecessor, the Office for Judicial Complaints, covering the years 2006/7-2018/19 are available in the Library of the House. Data on disciplinary action in the reports is broken down by the following types of judicial office holders - the courts judiciary, tribunals judiciary, coroners and magistrates, and sanctions imposed.

The publicly available information does not break the data down by office (Lay Magistrates, Deputy District Judges etc), but the action needed to obtain this information would give rise to a disproportionate cost.

The official statistics for judge sitting days (tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2019) were withdrawn on 5 September 2019, due to data discrepancies that were discovered after publication on 6 June 2019 and deemed potentially misleading to users. These discrepancies remain under investigation and, in line with the Code of Practice on Statistics, the Chief Statistician and Head of Profession decided to withdraw these tables until the investigations were complete.

The corrected figures will be published in the March 2020 publication if our investigation shows that the corrected figures meet the expected quality standards before then; if the appropriate quality standards cannot be met by then, the correct figures will be published in June 2020. This is the date when 2019 sitting days figures are due to be published as part of the normal publication cycle.

Until these investigations and corrections have been concluded, it is not possible to make a comparison against 2018 data.

We hold data in terms of ‘sitting days’ rather than hours.

(a) The official statistics for judge sitting days (tables 5.1, 5.2 and 5.3 of the Civil Justice Statistics Quarterly, January to March 2019) were withdrawn on 5 September 2019, due to data discrepancies that were discovered after publication on 6 June 2019 and deemed potentially misleading to users. These discrepancies remain under investigation and, in line with the Code of Practice on Statistics, the Chief Statistician and Head of Profession decided to withdraw these tables until the investigations were complete. The revised figures will be published in due course, and will provide the total sitting days in Family, Civil and Crown courts.

(b) We have not been provided with sitting day allocations for financial year 2020/21, but expect that all Recorders will be offered sufficient days to maintain and build up their skills and experience.

Information on how many Recorders have sat to hear cases in each year has only been held centrally since 2017/18. The below table, however, sets out the number of Recorders in post at 1^st April of each year since 2010. We expect Recorders in post to have been offered the opportunity to sit.

We are unable to supply details of how many Recorders sat in each court that was open on 1 May 2019. This is because the latest published data on sitting days only runs to December 2018 and under the Code of Practice for Official Statistics we cannot provide any more recent data until that data (covering 2019) has been published. The data for 2019 will be published in June 2020.

The latest published data is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-justice-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2019.

The table below shows the number of sitting days in courts in England that were presided over by a recorder in each of the last 18 months to December 2018. These figures cover sitting days by recorders in County, Family and Crown Courts.

We are only able to provide information to December 2018 as this aligns with the latest information on court sitting days which is published on Gov.uk and is available here. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-justice-statistics-quarterly-january-to-march-2019. It is part of the Royal Courts of Justice Annual Tables (which contain at Table 5.2 a breakdown of sitting days by type of work and level of judge)

The data source for these figures are a number of operational systems and as such are liable to change and may not reflect previously published statistics.

Last year Crown Court trial waiting times were at their lowest since 2014, with this year’s allocation of sitting days reflecting this.