Court statistics for England and Wales

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 in recent years and more than double the pre-Covid figure. The essay's "record eighty thousand" matches.
• 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.