Dear HM Courts and Tribunals Service,

Under the Freedom of Information Act I am requesting information on the use of remote hearings in Crown and Magistrates’ courts in England and Wales.

Please could you tell me:
1) The a) overall number and b) the proportion of hearings that have been mostly conducted via i) face to face, ii) video, or iii) audio for each week that data is available from June 2021 to January 2023. Please could this data be broken down by hearings from x) Crown Courts and y) Magistrates’ Courts.
2) If possible, please could you also break down the above request by i) offence type, ii) the individual Magistrates’ Court or the individual Crown Court, and the iii) age, sex and ethnicity of the defendant?
3) What proportion of hearings conducted by video in i) 2020, ii) 2021, and iii) 2022 used the Cloud Video Platform? If other platforms were used, please could you provide data on which platforms were used and how often.

For clarity, the categories I have set out for the mode of hearing are those used by HMCTS’ weekly operational management information. However, if other categories are being used, then I would still appreciate this data under your desired categories.

If any parts of the data requested are exempt from the FOIA, please make best efforts to provide alternative information, or respond to as much of the request as possible. For example:
- If information on the number and proportion of face-to-face, video or audio hearings is not available weekly, then please provide monthly data. If monthly data is not available, then please provide yearly data.
- If the timeframe of June 2021 to January 2023 is not possible then please provide information on the most similar timeframe for which data is available.
- If information on individual courts is not available, then please provide data by Local Justice Areas.

Please let me know if I can clarify any of these questions further, or help in any way to make this request easier or quicker to answer.

Yours faithfully,

Gideon Leibowitz