Investigations are overrun with data, says outgoing DPP

THE CPS cannot cope with the volume of data connected to cases, the outgoing Director of Public Prosecutions said as she denied overseeing a culture of conviction targets.

Alison Saunders, who is stepping down as DPP after five years, said the workload generated by data meant that thousands of cases, ranging from rape to fraud to modern slavery, were not being investigated properly.

“There is a huge issue to train all of [the people in] the system. In some cases, we’re seeing downloads [of online data] taking six to eight months and you have suspects and witnesses and victims waiting that long for the investigation,” she said.

“Take one recent rape case where they met on Tinder – it took 600 police hours to go through the digital material.

“You can have a judge say, ‘I want a download of that ipad’ – and it will take 15 officers working all weekend to get it.”

Last week a home affairs select committee report raised concerns about the state of policing as officers dealt with new and changing crimes with outdated technology.

The report recommended the Home Office needed to unify police databases and plan a National Digital Exploitation Centre for serious crime.

During her five-year tenure, Ms Saunders oversaw the conviction of the killers of Stephen Lawrence and said morale was “demonstrably better” than when she joined in 2013.

However, her fiercest critics labelled her as the “worst DPP in living history” and her service as “toxic.”

Ms Saunders, who is joining the City law firm Linklaters next month, said she accepted responsibility over the crisis in disclosure of evidence in rape cases which led to several trials collapsing and hundreds more being dropped earlier this year.

But she denied she enforced a culture of conviction targets, which she said would be “quite wrong” to do.

She said: “An acquittal, for example, is not a disaster – it’s the system working, because we are not judge and jury and nor should we ever be. What we do is apply a test: is there a reasonable prospect of conviction?”