| answer text |
<p>The number of effective<sup>1</sup> trials in the Crown Court for young adult defendants
aged 18-25 in the last five years is set out below. The information requested in relation
to magistrates’ courts trials for young adult defendants could only be obtained at
disproportionate cost. This is because whilst the data held on the HMCTS management
information systems contains manually collated data on trial volumes for adult and
youth cases, it does not collect data for the specific banding of those aged between
18-25.</p><p>For trials in the Crown Court, where the main defendant is in the age
group 18-25, the number of effective trials has consistently fallen over the time
period from 4,804 trials between October 2015 and September 2016 down 71% to 1,380
trials in the year ending September 2020. This is in line with national figures for
all age groups in the same time period where the number of effective trials fell 70%
from 18,967 to 5,726.</p><p>As it is not possible to provide numbers of young adult
trials for the magistrates’ courts, it is therefore not possible to provide the proportion
of Crown Court trials as a proportion of all effective trials for 18-25 year olds.</p><p>For
the 18-25 age range, we would need to extract data on every hearing or disposal and
calculate the age by using the date of birth and compare against the date of offence.
This would allow us to manually calculate the number of 18-25 year olds as there is
not a specific band for this<strong>.</strong></p><p> </p><table><tbody><tr><td colspan="2"><p><strong>Effective
Crown Court Trials<sup>1</sup></strong></p></td></tr><tr><td><p><strong>Year</strong></p></td><td><p><strong>18
- 25 years old<sup>3</sup></strong></p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Oct 2015 - Sep 2016</p></td><td><p>4,804</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Oct
2016 - Sep 2017</p></td><td><p>4,498</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Oct 2017 - Sep 2018</p></td><td><p>3,914</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Oct
2018 - Sep 2019</p></td><td><p>3,143</p></td></tr><tr><td><p>Oct 2019 - Sep 2020</p></td><td><p>1,380<sup>2</sup></p></td></tr></tbody></table><p>
</p><ol><li>A breakdown of the total number of trials listed during the reporting
period indicated. Not all cases will go to trial, for the purposes of trial effectiveness
we consider a ‘trial’ at the point of initial listing. A trial which goes ahead on
the planned date and occurs is then considered as ‘effective’. A trial that is listed
but does not go ahead is considered either cracked, ineffective or vacated as detailed
in the supporting guidance document which is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/criminal-court-statistics.</li><li>Estimates
for Oct 2019 - Sep 2020 exclude a small number of cases which have transitioned to
the Common Platform system in the early adopter site (Derby Crown Court).</li><li>Age
is calculated as the age of the main defendant at trial when the case was initially
received.</li></ol>
|
|
