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IFS - Crown Court backlog exacerbated by post-pandemic productivity slump
The Crown Court of England and Wales – the court that deals with the most serious offences – had around 75,000 outstanding cases at the end of 2024. That is 11% more than a year earlier, and almost twice as high as at the end of 2019.
This backlog has jumped since the pandemic, and continues to rise, despite a considerable increase in court resources. The number of sitting days (i.e. the number of days that judges ‘sit’ in court each year to hear cases, determined and funded by the Ministry of Justice) increased by 29% between 2019 and 2024. Yet the number of case disposals (completions) went up by only 17%.
In the post-pandemic period, the Crown Court has been getting through cases at a slower rate than previously. Some, but not all, of this can be explained by increases in case complexity. This post-pandemic slump in productivity has been a major factor behind the continued growth in the backlog of outstanding cases.
More positively, in the most recent months of data, there appears to have been a marked productivity improvement in the Crown Court. In fact, after adjusting for changes in case complexity, we estimate that Crown Court productivity recovered to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2024. But, with a more complex case mix, this improvement has not been enough to make inroads into the backlog. Given constraints on court capacity, further improvements in productivity – to above pre-pandemic levels – will very likely be needed for the government to make serious progress on reducing the backlog.
These are among the findings of new research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, which produces new estimates of productivity in the Crown Court as part of a new programme of work on the economics of the justice system.
Magdalena Domínguez, Senior Research Economist at IFS and an author of the research, said:
‘COVID-19 lockdowns caused a sharp increase in the Crown Court backlog, but the real puzzle is why the backlog has continued to grow since, despite a substantial (recent) increase in court resources. Our analysis suggests that a long slump in Crown Court productivity – the rate at which the court deals with cases – is a key part of the explanation.
‘In recent months, there are signs that Crown Court productivity has recovered. This is a good start, but with limits on the government’s ability to increase the number of court rooms, judges and barristers, further improvements in productivity will very likely be needed if the backlog is to start falling any time soon.’
Rob Street, Director of Justice at the Nuffield Foundation, said:
‘Justice delayed is justice denied and the ongoing backlog can have very real and negative consequences for the many people involved in Crown Court cases, whether victims, witnesses or defendants. The current focus on the courts often centres on funding, but this important new analysis reminds us that examining how effectively resources are used is also critical.’
Other findings of the research include:
- The Crown Court case disposal rate – a crude measure of productivity – dropped from 1.16 disposals per sitting day in 2019–20 to 0.96 in 2021–22 and 0.90 in 2022–23. It recovered somewhat to 0.97 in 2023–24, and then to 1.05 case disposals per sitting day in the first three quarters of 2024–25.
- Had the case disposal rate remained at its 2019–20 level over the past four years, the Crown Court could have disposed of an additional 78,000 cases – on the face of it, enough to entirely clear the backlog.
- Average case complexity in the backlog has increased (in the sense that the average case requires more court time and resource). In particular, sexual offences and violent offences now make up a greater share of the outstanding caseload (around 46% in 2024, versus 33% in 2019). These cases usually require more court resources, as defendants are less likely to plead guilty and average hearing times are longer. Additionally, during the COVID-19 pandemic and the barristers’ strike in 2022, the Court focused on simpler cases, increasing the average complexity of those that remained to be dealt with.
- Even when adjusting for complexity, productivity fell sharply after 2019, and remained comfortably below pre-pandemic levels until the second half of 2024. Of the cumulative shortfall of 78,000 case disposals over the years 2021 to 2024, we estimate that only around one-third can be explained by rising case complexity in the backlog.
- Another key trend has been the pronounced and concerning increase in the number of ineffective trials – trials that cannot go ahead on the day planned and have to be rescheduled. These represented 36% of all trials in 2022 (the year of the barristers’ strike), 27% in 2023 and 25% in 2024, versus around 15% in the years prior to the pandemic.
- This rise in ineffective trials appears to have had only a modest impact on the backlog. An analysis of the underlying causes – which include staff shortages (i.e. a missing defence or prosecution advocate), issues with the preparation of the case for the prosecution, a failure of prison escort services to get defendants to the trial on time, and too many cases being scheduled for the same day – points to wider systemic problems.
- It is difficult, with publicly available data, to pin down why productivity in the Crown Court fell in the years after the pandemic. The two most commonly cited factors – rising case complexity, and ineffective trials (including due to barristers’ strikes) – appear to explain only part of the decline in the case disposal rate. While further research is needed, it seems likely that problems in other parts of the criminal justice system have contributed to issues in the Crown Court. In addition, on top of the pressures from a more complex caseload, the backlog itself could be making it harder for the court to process cases, if the quality of evidence deteriorates with time and defendants delay any guilty plea when faced with a long wait for a trial.
