Thorley Stephenson Solicitors Edinburgh Blog

The Scottish Government has awarded additional funding of a total of £1.1 million towards the prosecution service in an effort to combat court delays following a rise in the number of reported sexual offences in Scotland in recent years, with sexual offences now comprising “approximately 75% of the Crown Office’s workload”. The new funds provided are designed to go towards the improvement of communication between complainers and the Crown Court as well as to prevent any delays in cases going to court.

For the 2018/19 period, the Home Secretary has approved up to £70m to go into the Police Transformation Fund (PTF) in order to develop law enforcement’s capacity to deal with the most serious criminal threats across the UK. With 98 projects benefiting from the £223 million PTF funding in phase 1 (2016/17 to 2017/18), phase 2 (2018/19 to 2019/20) will focus on the national programmes and demands to tackle serious and organised criminal activity.

Property and violent crimes make up the majority of crimes in Scottish criminal justice proceedings (68% and 32% respectively, see Fig.1). 

After a recent analysis revealed that remanded prisoners were more likely to die than those serving sentences, Scottish Labour have requested a full government review.

A Scottish man has been sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of fraudulently obtaining more than £55,000 from his father-in-law.