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Crown Court: Trials

Asked by Katie LamConservativeMinistry of JusticeTabled Answered 17 July 2026UIN 17589

The 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.

Answered by Sarah Sackman

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.

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