House of Commons Briefing Paper: Court Statistics for England and Wales

The House of Commons library has just published a briefing paper containing the latest court statistics for England and Wales.

I'm a big fan of these briefing papers because they summarise key statistics in a very simple and informative manner.

You can view the full briefing paper here.

Some of the key snippets from the perspective of the Magistrates' Court:

• Between 2012/13 and 2017/18 the number of Magistrates fell from 23,401 to 15,003. This represents a fall of 36 percent.
• Between 2012/13 and 2017/18 the caseload of the Magistrates' Court has fallen by around 5 percent, which is mainly attributable to the increase in out of court disposals.
• Since 2010 the number of Magistrates' Courts has decreased from 323 to 161. Following a recent consultation exercise, an additional five Magistrates' Courts have been earmarked for closure in the next few months.
• In 2017/18, 55 percent of Magistrates were female, compared with 52 percent in 2012/13.
• In 2017/18, 11 percent of Magistrates were BAME, compared with 8 percent in 2012/13.
• In 2017/18, 55 percent of Magistrates were aged 60 or over, which is about the same as in 2012/13.
• In 2017 there was a median wait of 100 days between an offence being recorded and someone being charged; there was a median wait of 28 days between a defendant being charged and the first court listing; and there was a median time of 147 days between the offence being reported to the completion of the case.
• On average, it took 3 weeks longer for the criminal courts to complete cases in 2017 than it did in 2010.
• Over the last five years the proportion of effective trials at the Magistrates' Court has slowly been increasing.

The image above shows how the distances of various localities to their nearest Magistrates' Court has changed since 2010.

Darker shades of green represent further to travel. It is immediately obvious that far more people are having to travel distances in excess of 20 miles to their nearest Magistrates' Court. Quite often those communities have infrequent or non-existent public transport links. The north of England, Wales and East Anglia are particularly badly served.

The centralisation of particular types of case (e.g. moving traffic offences, TV licence offences etc) also means that court users are far more likely to have to travel to a non-local court that is even further away. Court closures and the merger of local justice areas mean that many Magistrates have to undertake hour-long journeys to get to court.

There is little doubt that the concept of "local justice" is being stretched to the absolute limit.