To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will publish his Department's estimated projections of reductions in courts backlog by year, over the next five years.
Answered on
9 March 2022
We continue to take action to tackle the impact the pandemic has had on our courts and tribunals system. We invested a quarter of a billion pounds to support recovery in the last financial year (20/21).
We have extended 30 Crown Nightingale courtrooms and opened two new ‘super courtrooms’ in Manchester and Loughborough. We have also removed the limit on the number of days the Crown Court can sit this year, and our rapid roll out of video technology means over 70 per cent of all courtrooms are now equipped with the video conferencing hardware to run our Cloud Video Platform, which enabled up to 20,000 cases to be heard virtually every week.
These measures are already working – the backlog in the Crown Court has reduced from around 61,000 cases in June 2021 to around 58,400 cases at the end of December 2021.
In the recent Spending Review, more than £1 billion has been allocated to boost capacity and accelerate recovery from the pandemic in courts and tribunals. This increased funding will enable us to hear more cases and reduce backlogs.
As part of the Spending Review, we will be investing £477 million in the Criminal Justice System over the next three years which will allow us to reduce Crown Court backlogs to an estimated 53,000 by March 2025. In the next financial year, we expect to get through 20% more Crown Court cases than we did pre-Covid (117,000 in 22/23 compared to 97,000 in 19/20). These are based on internal projections which are produced for the purpose of departmental planning and would therefore not normally be published.