Justice Denied: Civil servants 'working until midnight' due to 'massive problems' with Scottish court backlogs
Concern over workloads and staffing pressures at Crown Office and Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service
Civil servants working across key organisations in Scotland’s criminal justice system are facing “massive problems”, with a lack of staff impeding efforts to drive down the criminal case backlog brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, a union official has warned.
Joy Dunn, industrial officer with the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents around 1,700 employees across the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS) and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS), said the situation was now worse that at the height of the pandemic.
She said some people were working until midnight due to the vast caseloads.
Giving evidence to the Scottish Covid-19 inquiry this week, Ms Dunn described the workload facing the union’s members as a “huge issue”, and cited Justice Denied, The Scotsman’s ongoing week-long series scrutinising pressures in the criminal justice system.
“There is no doubt that our members have done an amazing job in clearing a huge part of that backlog,” she said. “In two years, something like 20,000 cases were cleared. But there’s still a huge backlog ahead of us and our members are working as hard as they can, but there’s not enough of them to clear these backlogs. The Scotsman this week has been running a series about what that looks like.”
Ms Dunn added: “If anything, it’s worse now, because the backlog is there, the digital and IT systems in the court service and COPFS don't speak to each other. The training is not adequate, there is not enough staff in place to clear that backlog.
“I have reports regularly of staff who work until midnight. That might be something that is routine for a lawyer, it’s not for admin or executive office staff, who are low paid. The SCTS and Crown Office are working on the good will of staff. There are massive problems.”
Ms Dunn expanded upon the pressures in her written submission to the inquiry. In it, she pointed out that rising demand and the growing complexity of tasks had left the union’s members “struggling to keep up with their workload”, with the quantity of work and low pay making it difficult to recruit and retain staff.
She said more than a third of respondents to a survey of its members in the COPFS said their workload was either “somewhat or completely unmanageable", with morale plummeting, mental ill health increasing, and sickness absence rates “soaring”.
Ms Dunn is not the only union official to raise concerns about the impact on staff in Scotland’s criminal justice system. Allan Sampson, national officer at the FDA union, which represents legal and professional staff in the COPFS, told The Scotsman the upturn in funding for the organisation proposed in the latest Scottish Budget was insufficient to tackle the “long-term impact of a decade of underfunding”.
He said: “Procurator fiscals are committed professionals who work hard every day to deliver justice for the people of Scotland, but they are working under extreme pressure. Our members are handling more serious and complex cases than ever before with inadequate resources.
“The backlog from the pandemic remains significant, and new legislative responsibilities continue to add to workloads. Without sustained further investment, we risk undermining public confidence in Scotland’s justice system and placing intolerable strain on an already overstretched workforce.”
The pressures of responding to a significant increase in victims of crime during and after the pandemic were also laid bare last year. This came in the form of a HM Inspectorate of Prosecution in Scotland report into the operation of a COPFS service contact centre designed to assist both victims and witnesses of crime,
The report found while the service received 343,205 calls in the year between October 2023 and September last year, nearly one in five (19 per cent) of them were not admitted to the call queue because it was full. Of those calls that were placed in the queue, half were then abandoned by the caller before they spoke to an operator.
Callers waited an average of eight minutes and 34 seconds to speak to an operator. The maximum time a caller spent in the queue was 74 minutes, which COPFS say was on a date when it suffered a system failure.
In an interview with The Scotsman, John Logue, the Crown Agent and chief executive of the COPFS, said the organisation was looking at the resources, skills, training and systems it used. “We upgraded the system used to take calls a few years ago, and if we need to do that again, that’s something that would be a very high priority,” he said.
Mr Logue said the COPFS had grown “considerably” in size thanks in part to time-limited funding following the pandemic, and that its needs had been recognised.
“Even before the pandemic, we were making cases to the Government for increased funding because of changes in the system, and in my experience, all of those budget discussions have been very positive, and we’ve always had a fair hearing,” he said. “The Government has provided us with additional funding.
“This is an organisation that has grown considerably and some of that is due to time-limited funding, such as the team of around 100 people investigating Covid-19 deaths. We also have similar funding to resource extra courts.
“I’m not sure any public sector organisation could ever say they have every bit of resource they ever want. But we’ve been listened to by the Government. It understands the challenges we face and it has responded.”