§ Mr. Whitakerasked the Attorney-General what is the average time spent waiting for a transcript by appellants in the Criminal Division of the Court of Appeal compared with one and five years ago; and what remedy he proposes.
Mr. Attorney-GeneralIf there are taken into account both appeals and applications for leave to appeal which do not lead to appeals, the current average interval between a request by the Criminal Appeal Office for a transcript and its delivery is 14 weeks. The corresponding period in 1963 was 5½ weeks. There are no precisely comparable figures for 1967, but an analysis of a relatively small sample made in July of that year showed that, in the case of appeals, the average interval was then 8 weeks.
My noble friend the Lord Chancellor and I are very conscious of the desirability of reducing this period; the success of any efforts to this end depends largely on the possibility of reducing pressure on the shorthandwriters; and we hope very 355W much that the recently extended facilities for legal advice will assist by reducing the number of hopeless appeals and, in consequence, the number of requests for transcripts. Apart from that, my noble Friend the Lord Chancellor has taken steps to encourage the criminal courts so to arrange their business as to minimise demands on the shorthandwriters' time and, by installing mechanical recording apparatus in the Royal Courts of Justice, to reduce the time taken by shorthandwriters in civil actions and thus to make more of their time available for criminal trials.