Crown Court backlog holds at 80,061 as cases open a year or more hit 22,124

The Crown Court of England and Wales ended March 2026 with 80,061 cases still open, according to the quarterly criminal court statistics the Ministry of Justice published on 25 June 2026. That total is about 5 per cent higher than a year earlier. The figure that moved furthest, however, was not the headline caseload but its age: 22,124 Crown Court cases had been open for 12 months or longer, which the bulletin records as a peak for the series.

Those long running cases are concentrated in the offences where delay costs most. The bulletin reports that violence against the person accounted for 31 per cent of cases open a year or more, and sexual offences for 23 per cent, so that over half of the oldest caseload involves complainants who must hold their evidence together while they wait.

The same release carries the first piece of arithmetic to break the other way in three years. The Crown Court received 29,426 cases in the January to March quarter and disposed of 29,600, the first quarter since the first three months of 2023 in which disposals exceeded receipts. The effect on the stockpile was almost invisible. The open caseload fell by fewer than 100 cases across the quarter.

The magistrates' courts show no such crossover. Their open caseload reached 370,722 at the end of March 2026, a peak since the comparable series began in 2019, with receipts of 386,056 against disposals of 380,082. About half of that caseload is low level work under the single justice procedure, but the more serious non single justice cases rose to 184,565, a post pandemic high.

Timeliness has moved with the caseload. The median time from offence to completion in the Crown Court was 346 days, up 6 per cent year on year. In the magistrates' courts the median from offence to completion was 197 days, and the median from charge to completion was 52 days, a rise of 33 per cent on the year. Trials continue to fail at scale: in the Crown Court 46 per cent of listed trials were effective, 30 per cent cracked and 24 per cent ineffective, while in the magistrates' courts the split was 39 per cent effective, 40 per cent cracked and 21 per cent ineffective.

The preceding quarter set the marker. The statistics for October to December 2025, published on 26 March 2026, recorded open caseloads at series peaks in both jurisdictions and the Crown Court passing 80,000 open cases for the first time.

The National Audit Office examined the problem in Reducing the backlog in the Crown Court, HC 634 of Session 2024 to 2025, published on 24 May 2024 and revised on 5 March 2025. Its conclusions were about the machinery rather than the number: the Ministry needed more accurate projections of case flow, departments needed to understand how a policy change in one part of the system lands in another, and the Criminal Justice Board needed a firmer hand on efficiency and resilience. The revision is itself part of the story. The NAO reissued the report after the Ministry found errors in historical Crown Court data caused by the rollout of the Common Platform digital case system, though the NAO stated the corrections did not change its findings.

Sir Brian Leveson, former President of the Queen's Bench Division, was commissioned by the Lord Chancellor to review the criminal courts against two stated themes: reform, so that cases are dealt with proportionately given the pressure on the Crown Court, and efficiency of the courts and their partner agencies. Part 1 was published on 9 July 2025. Part 2 followed on 4 February 2026, running to a 24 page overview and two volumes of 364 and 392 pages. What Parliament does with either part is not yet settled.

Australia measures the same disease with a different thermometer. The Productivity Commission released the Courts section of the Report on Government Services 2026 on 3 February 2026, reporting a national criminal clearance rate of 96.7 per cent and a civil rate of 98.7 per cent, and noting that at 30 June 2025 the backlog in civil courts was generally higher than in criminal courts across most states and territories. The Commission publishes backlog as the share of pending cases older than 12 and 24 months by jurisdiction rather than as a single national number, which makes a direct comparison with the English count of 22,124 aged cases impossible on the published figures.

The Australian spending figures do not sit neatly together either. The Courts section reports total recurrent expenditure by state and territory courts, excluding payroll tax, of about $2.77 billion in 2024-25, an increase of 26.6 per cent since 2015-16. The Justice sector overview, released later on 3 June 2026, puts courts at $2.4 billion, or $87 per person, within a justice sector total of $26.5 billion net of own source revenue. The two rest on different bases and the Commission does not reconcile them on the page.

What is not known is whether the single quarter in which English disposals outran receipts marks a turn or a blip, and whether the count of cases aged over a year keeps climbing even if the total caseload flattens. No official projection published in the material examined here gives a date by which the Crown Court caseload returns to its pre 2019 level.