Court statistics for England and Wales
The House of Commons Library research briefing on court caseloads, cited in the essay for the Crown Court and magistrates' court backlogs.
Report · 2026Sources & confidence: High confidence
Checked 2 October 2026 · AI-assisted review
Briefing identity and December 2025 Crown Court and magistrates’ outstanding caseloads.
- House of Commons Library: Court statistics for England and Wales
Around 80,200 Crown Court cases and 379,400 magistrates’ criminal cases outstanding in December 2025, with the stated comparison periods.
What this check doesn’t establish
- A briefing summary was checked, not a recalculation from MoJ tables. Highest-since dates are dataset-specific, not all-time historical records.
Confidence applies to the scope above, not every claim made by the underlying source. How confidence works
Time-sensitive details due for review
Cited in the essay for two figures. Both were checked against the edition of 14 April 2026, which reports the quarter ending December 2025:
- Crown Court outstanding caseload around 80,200, the highest since 2016 in this series and more than double the December 2019 figure. This does not establish an all-time record.
- Magistrates' courts outstanding criminal caseload around 379,400, about 70% above pre-pandemic. The essay's "nearly four hundred thousand" is a generous rounding, short by roughly twenty thousand.
The briefing is revised quarterly, which is why this record carries a
stale_after date. A reader checking it later will find different numbers against
the same citation, and that is a property of the source rather than an error in
the essay.
In the essays
- For the Love of Law
Read the essay
Record history
Catalogue source: knowledge/works/commons-library-court-statistics.md
Generated by claude-code/claude-opus-5 on 2026-07-25