THANKS to the injection of an additional £3.6 million from the Scottish Government, the biggest team of Scots-qualified lawyers in the country is about to get a little bit bigger.
The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), which currently employs in the region of 500 lawyers across the country, is using the cash to fund the recruitment of 140 members of staff, 60 of whom will be lawyers.
This will bring the number of prosecutors working at the service back up to 2009-10 levels, with Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC – Scotland’s chief prosecutor – saying that the increase in funding from the Government “represents a strong commitment to supporting the work of the independent public prosecutor within the criminal justice system”.
According to a spokesman, the Scottish Government’s main motivation for topping up the £116m of funding it has already budgeted to provide to COPFS for the current financial year is to reduce the length of time it takes to get domestic abuse and sexual offences cases to court.
“We awarded an additional £1.1m this year to tackle waiting times in the high court for cases involving rape, including £800,000 to COPFS,” the spokesman said. “This funding, including the [latest] budget allocation, will assist COPFS to recruit additional fiscals, ensure other parts of the criminal justice system are involved as needed, and improve the support provided to complainers.”
While Audit Scotland noted earlier this year that COPFS faced “longer-term budget challenges” and would have to make savings of £15m over the five-year period to 2022-23, COPFS deputy crown agent John Logue said that the service was able to make the case for additional funding because of the way sexual offences cases in particular are now handled.
“As part of our annual budget setting we indicate where the opportunities are to make things better and over the course of the last year we’ve been signalling to the Government that the job we have to do has changed quite significantly,” Mr Logue said.
“There’s been a significant increase in the level of reporting of sexual offences and some sexual offences that are being reported are of a different nature.
“Now we have cases that have multiple victims whereas previously there would have been one victim and one accused.
“They are now much more complex to investigate and bring to court and trials themselves are longer and more complex.”
While the new recruits will initially spend up to two years preparing cases for the sheriff and justice of the peace courts, the additional resource will free up existing prosecutors to bolster the service’s serious case work. This will allow teams of senior lawyers to prepare cases that would previously have been the responsibility of a single prosecutor.
It comes at a time when the Law Society of Scotland is drawing up plans to allow first-year trainee solicitors to appear in court to defend criminal cases. Law Society president Alison Atack said the move is being mooted because “fewer and fewer new solicitors are choosing to undertake criminal defence work”.
“There is an important debate to be had on the resourcing of legal aid and the pressures which are being placed on criminal defence solicitors,” she said.
However, Ian Moir, co-convenor of the legal aid committee at the Law Society, said that as the Government has been able to provide extra cash to fund prosecutions it should now balance that out with additional legal aid funding for criminal defence work.
“For many years we’ve argued that the Crown and defence need more funding in order to prosecute and defend crime - both sides are desperately in need of funding after years of chronic underfunding,” Mr Moir said.
“I welcome funding for the Crown but it certainly increases the need for urgent funding to be put into the legal aid system.”
Earlier this year Carnegie UK Trust chief executive Martyn Evans carried out an independent review of legal aid on behalf of the Government, saying he could find no justification for an increase in fee levels.
The Government said it would respond to Mr Evans’ recommendations “in the autumn”.
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