717 CASES awaiting trial at the High Court

HIGH courts in Scotland have a backlog of 717 cases awaiting trial, including 49 killings, 465 serious sexual assaults and 182 other “major crimes”.

The Lord Advocate yesterday told Holyrood’s justice committee “a significant additional backlog of cases has built up at all levels of the court system” since the start of the coronavirus crisis.

James Wolffe warned it will keep increasing until courts can return “at least to something like their pre-Covid-19 capacity”.

David Harvie, the head of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, told MSPs 717 cases are awaiting trial at the High Court, with at least one person on remand in 238 cases.

As of June 10, a further 1584 cases have been indicted awaiting trial in the sheriff and jury courts – an increase of 11 per cent since the end of March.

Harvie said the backlog of cases before the pandemic was already 14 per cent higher in March than the previous year, with 18,319 cases outstanding across all levels of the criminal justice system.

He told the committee the number of crimes reported to the Crown Office fell from 12,450 in March to 10,063 cases in April.

However, by May this had again risen to 12,436.

He said: “Our expectations from those numbers is that will give us an extra 300 High Court and 1500 sheriff and jury cases, simply from those three months’ worth of reports.”

Wolffe said summary trials as well as preliminary hearings in the High Court are set to resume this week, while two models of jury trials will be tested next month.

The Lord Advocate added: “The Crown is continuing to process its existing caseload, it’s continuing to receive reports of crime and, to deal with those, it’s continuing to indict cases into the solemn courts and it’s continuing to serve summary complaints.”

He said about 1500 laptops and 800 smartphones have been issued to staff in the court system, enabling an estimated 90 per cent to work from home during lockdown.