Sackman: Our plans are working
“Headway is finally being made” in reducing delays in the county courts, justice minister Sarah Sackman declared yesterday on the back of positive statistics on wait times.
The latest civil justice statistics showed that the median time taken for small claims to go from issue to trial in 2025 was 39.3 weeks, nearly four weeks faster than in 2024.
For fast, intermediate and multi-track claims, it was 60.7 weeks, 6.2 weeks faster than the previous year.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has only reported on median wait times since 2022, having previously just used the mean figure.
On the latter measure – which can be skewed by extremes – the average wait for small claims was 48.6 weeks and down by only 1.8 weeks from the year before. For other claims, the wait was 72.6 weeks, almost six weeks less than 2024.
Using either average, though, the reductions have gathered pace through 2025; the figures for the last quarter of 2025 are roughly six weeks faster than the same period in 2024.
However, the Q4 2025 mean figures are still both around 10 weeks slower than Q4 2019, the last period unaffected by Covid.
The MoJ said total county court claims have been steadily increasing over the last five years, a 12% increase in 2025 taking the total to 1.94m.
That concealed a 22% reduction in the number of personal injury claims in 2025, to 48,272, more than half the number in 2020 and a third of those brought in 2017.
The statistics also showed the slow take-up of the intermediate track, with 2,761 cases allocated to it in 2025, just 2% of all cases allocated to a track in the year.
Sarah Sackman, the minister for courts, commented: “We inherited a courts system in crisis, with many people facing far too long a wait for their civil case to reach trial.
“But our plans are working, and headway is finally being made. The figures show claims are being processed faster by more than six weeks compared to this time last year – delivering on our promise of swifter justice and a fairer system.
“We are doing more to modernise our civil courts. We’re recruiting around 1,000 judges and tribunal members, increasing county court sitting days and investing £50m in digitalisation for faster services.”
Matthew Maxwell-Scott, executive director of the Association of Consumer Support Organisations, “cautiously” welcomed the improvement but noted the government’s focus on the median wait time, rather than mean, which meant that “those facing particularly long delays are seeing their cases excluded from the numbers”.
He said: “Three successive quarters of improvements in the median waits represents progress but on a like-for-like basis things seem to way off where they were before Covid struck.
“In order for these statistics to be credible, the MoJ needs either to stick to one set of numbers or provide the missing data for median waits, as these only go back to 2022.
“Even looking at the more favourable interpretation, people are waiting more than a year when it comes to more serious cases and around nine months for a small claim.
“But the experience for many claimants will be far worse than this and they may understandably not be very impressed by the government’s statistical gymnastics here.”
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