Increased sitting days and higher crown court disposal rates are successfully reducing the backlog of cases
Nick Goodwin jumped into the deep end of the row over the government’s plans for jury trials as the courts boss last week gave evidence to MPs.
The chief executive of HM Courts and Tribunals Service probably did not intend to prod the hornet’s nest when he simply dished out dry technical statistics about disposal rates in the crown courts of England and Wales.
Those rates, Goodwin told the committee, relate to the number of cases courts get through in a given day. “At the moment”, he said, the rate had ascribed to a figure of 1.06. “We assumed it would be 1.0,” Goodwin continued, adding, “what you are seeing even in that marginal increase is that we are getting both more sittings and a higher disposal rate. That is a really powerful thing.”
