The Crown Court ended March with 80,061 open cases. That was 37 fewer than three months earlier, when the caseload reached 80,098, but it was still 5 per cent higher than a year before.
The more serious movement was inside that total. 22,124 cases had been open for at least a year, the highest number in the current series. That was 4,305 more than a year earlier, an increase of 24 per cent. The median age of an open Crown Court case had risen to 196 days, also a series high.
More than half of the cases open for a year or longer involved violence against the person or sexual offences. Rape cases alone accounted for 11 per cent of the caseload open for a year or more.
Those figures came despite a measurable improvement in the number of cases being completed.
The Crown Court disposed of 29,600 cases between January and March, the highest quarterly figure since Covid. It received 29,426. Disposals exceeded incoming cases for the first time since the first quarter of 2023.
That was enough to stop the overall caseload growing. It was not enough to make a meaningful reduction in it.
The Ministry of Justice's 80,061 figure should not be read as 80,061 defendants all waiting for a jury trial. The open caseload includes cases at different stages, including cases recently received and cases approaching disposal. The department itself says the figure needs to be read alongside waiting times and the age of cases.
Those measures have continued to deteriorate.
Among defendants who pleaded not guilty and eventually had a jury trial, the median wait between the case reaching the Crown Court and the main hearing was 48 weeks. For defendants who remained on bail, the median was 66.3 weeks. These figures look back at cases that have already completed; they are not estimates of how long somebody entering the system today will wait.
The backlog was already a serious problem before Labour took office.
At the 2021 Spending Review, the Conservative government set an ambition to reduce the Crown Court caseload to 53,000 by March 2025, backed by £477 million for the recovery of criminal justice after the pandemic. The National Audit Office found in 2024 that the target was no longer achievable. Its revised report said the Ministry of Justice had underestimated incoming cases and needed better projections of how changes elsewhere in the justice system would affect the courts.
By March 2025 the caseload was 76,957, rather than 53,000. The failure of that target was therefore not created by the present Justice Secretary or by a policy introduced in 2026. It was already off course before the change of government, and the NAO had said so before the 2024 election.
Labour has since increased the amount of Crown Court time it is prepared to fund. By February this year, the government said it had funded 112,250 Crown Court sitting days for 2025/26, 5,000 more than the previous government.
The Ministry of Justice has also been unusually clear about the limit of that approach.
In February it told Parliament that Crown Court demand was forecast to be 7 per cent higher by 2030 and that the courts would need to sit for 139,000 days a year merely to keep up with that level of demand. It said even that would not reduce the backlog. The Lady Chief Justice had estimated that the judiciary could presently manage around 113,000 sitting days. Shortages of judges, prosecutors and defence barristers mean funding more court days does not automatically create the people needed to use them.
That problem had already been acknowledged in the government's formal response to the Public Accounts Committee. Ministers pointed to increased sitting days, judicial recruitment, court maintenance spending, additional legal aid funding and changes to magistrates' sentencing powers, but accepted that those measures alone were not enough to reduce the outstanding caseload.
The latest figures show both sides of that record. Crown Court disposals have reached their highest quarterly level since the pandemic, and for one quarter the courts completed slightly more cases than they received. The total open caseload consequently fell rather than rose.
But the ageing of the caseload continued. Cases open for at least a year increased from 20,939 at the end of December to 22,124 at the end of March.