Crown Court: Standards
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what modelling he has undertaken of the Crown Court backlog under (a) current funding levels and (b) alternative funding scenarios; when the backlog will return to pre-pandemic levels; and whether regional projections have been prepared.
Answered by Sarah Sackman
The Department publishes Crown Court open caseload projections annually. The current release (from December 2025) is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/prison-population-projections-2025-to-2030. We do not have equivalent projections at a regional level.
The Courts and Tribunals Bill was introduced in the House of Commons on 25 February 2026. That week, we also announced that there will be no financial limit to the amount of work the Crown Court can take on for the next financial year – in 2026-27, we are enabling the Crown Court to work at full judicial and court system capacity.
We published an impact factsheet alongside the Bill, assessing how the Government’s financial commitments on sitting days could affect the Crown Court open caseload under different scenarios. This can be found at: Courts and Tribunals Bill - GOV.UK. Only by pulling every lever we have – investment, efficiency and structural reform – can we turn the tide on the open caseload.
For data on the latest backlog volume, see the ‘Crown Court Receipts, Disposals and Open cases tool’ in the Criminal Court Statistics quarterly release: Criminal court statistics quarterly: January to March 2026 - GOV.UK.
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