Business plan 2026-27

I am pleased to present our Business Plan for 2026-27, which sets out how we will deliver the first year of our Strategic Plan 2030 in a challenging and evolving operating environment.

Over the past year, we have strengthened our foundations to support long term improvement. We have restructured to better align our organisation to our strategic priorities and enhanced our leadership team to ensure we have the capacity, capability and focus needed to deliver sustainable change.

I continue to see strong commitment across the organisation to our priorities, including improving the experience of women and children in justice, improving communication, strengthening partnership working, and supporting a more effective justice system. These priorities continue to sit at the heart of our Strategic Plan 2030 and remain central to how we serve the people of Scotland.

We are progressing from pandemic recovery into a period of sustained transformation, modernising the way we deliver high quality casework and contribute to wider criminal justice reform. Summary Case Management is now embedded as part of a more efficient and collaborative system, supporting earlier resolution and better outcomes. Alongside this, we are seeing the benefit of our investment in digital and data enabled services including the Witness Gateway, Defence Agent Service and Digital Evidence Sharing Capability.

Like all public services, we face ongoing resource constraints. However, the plans we have put in place, alongside recent investment in our workforce, give us confidence that we are well positioned to meet the challenges ahead. In 2026-27, our focus will include reducing waiting times for justice and for death investigations, continuing to adapt to an increasing solemn court caseload, completing outstanding Covid-19 death investigations, and sustaining performance as demand continues to evolve.

None of this would be possible without the dedication, professionalism and expertise of our people. Their commitment underpins our ability to deliver the ambitions set out in our Strategic Plan 2030. We remain committed to supporting our people through change by strengthening training, guidance and leadership capability, and by maintaining strong governance and accountability.

John Logue
Crown Agent and Chief Executive

Our strategic plan sets the priorities and direction of our work.

Our values

• Being professional
• Showing respect

Our strategic aims

• Delivering high quality casework
• Improving the experience of victims, witnesses and bereaved nearest relatives
• Enabling our staff to be their best
• Modernising the way we work
• Transforming criminal justice

Our cross-cutting themes

• Efficiency
• Sustainability
• Digital and data driven and AI enabled
• Continuous improvement
• Trauma informed
• Open and proactive engagement with justice partners, stakeholders and the public

Delivering our strategy

Our business plan for 2026-27 matches the work of each unit and function in COPFS against our strategic aims and transformation priorities.

The plan focuses on high level strategic priorities that senior leaders will monitor throughout the year. Function and team business plans explain the detailed work we need to do to achieve our organisational goals

Delivering high quality casework remains our core purpose and the foundation of public confidence in COPFS.

In 2026–27, we will continue to take independent, well-reasoned legal decisions; prosecute cases effectively and proportionately; and investigate deaths thoroughly, lawfully and sensitively. Our business-as-usual focus will be on maintaining professional standards, supporting consistent high-quality decision making, managing complex and high-risk cases, and ensuring cases progress efficiently through the justice system while meeting our statutory duties.

Planned improvement activity in 2026-27

• Publish a new prosecution code and test and embed its application and recording of decisions in our legal processes, ensuring that decisions taken are consistent, fair, proportionate and properly recorded.
• Reduce Covid‑related solemn and summary backlogs and unindicted cases to ensure no cases time bar during the extended and regular time‑bar regimes through to May 2027, with clear corporate oversight of capacity and prioritisation decisions. Introduce quick-win changes to the High Court operating model to stabilise increasing caseload, focused on early quality decision making.
• Change how sexual offences and other complex cases are prepared and prosecuted. We will implement agreed recommendations from the Sexual Offences Review and redesign processes, so these cases are handled by trained specialists, with clearer standards and stronger oversight.
• Improve processes in relation to investigation of deaths in custody working with partner agencies, informed by recommendations from the Abercrombie Review.

Improving the experience of those who engage with COPFS remains a critical part of our public service role.

In 2026–27, our business‑as‑usual activity will focus on delivering a professional, respectful service, ensuring people are kept informed and treated with dignity throughout the justice process. We will continue to work with partners to reduce avoidable distress, improve communication, and ensure our approach reflects the needs of victims, witnesses and bereaved families.

Planned improvement activity in 2026-27

• Introduce a clear, trauma‑informed communication standard. We will make trauma‑informed working a core expectation, supported by enhanced training, champions and leadership, to protect both staff wellbeing and service quality.
• Reduce unnecessary citations and repeat court attendance (by 15% in Sheriff Summary courts). We will change how witnesses are cited and scheduled, using better planning and digital tools, to reduce disruption and stress. We will consider the recommendations from the recent inspection of Sheriff Court citations planned by HM Inspectorate of Prosecution to further improve our processes.
• Implement changes to enable more child witnesses to give pre-recorded evidence in the Sheriff Court, reducing the trauma of attending court.
• Provide earlier, meaningful information to bereaved families in death investigations. We will pilot and, where effective, roll out early sharing of key factual information so families are not left waiting without understanding the stage of the investigation.

Our people are central to delivering justice and enabling them to perform at their best is a core priority.

In 2026–27, we will continue to support staff through effective leadership, clear expectations, and access to the digital tools, skills and learning they need to do their roles well. Alongside business as usual, we will focus on workforce capability, wellbeing, and professional development to ensure COPFS remains a resilient, skilled and inclusive organisation.

Planned improvement activity in 2026-27

• Refresh our employee wellbeing strategy and action plan, with changes to recruitment processes, the scope of wellbeing initiatives, and the provision of both online and in‑person support services. We will also deliver the agreed actions from the Vicarious Trauma Review to strengthen support for employees exposed to traumatic material and build workforce resilience.
• Complete the Designed for Success programme, implementing the proposed organisational design changes, including streamlined management structures with clear and consistent spans of control.
• Strengthen leadership capability during periods of change. We will ensure managers receive targeted leadership and management training so they can lead change well, support staff and maintain performance.
• Review and redesign core learning for case preparation and other operational staff learning with emphasis on geographic and role-based learning providing broader access to learning.
• Improve and rationalise our estate by taking advantage of lease breaks and improving working environments, creating high quality places to work that support collaboration and performance.

Modernising how COPFS operates is essential to delivering our services in a fiscally constrained environment with increasing complex demand.

In 2026–27, we will continue to run our core business while strengthening the systems, processes and data that support it. Our focus will be on improving case management, making better use of digital tools and information, and streamlining corporate processes so our people can spend more time on high‑value work and less on administrative burden.

Planned improvement activity in 2026-27

• Introduce a single, COPFS‑wide performance and insight framework. We will replace fragmented reporting with a shared set of measures that give a clear picture of quality, timeliness and demand across the organisation.
• Standardise core processes where consistency matters most. We aim to agree national ways of working for key processes, while allowing flexibility where specialist or case specific judgement is needed. We will start by piloting standard operating procedures across summary business.
• Modernise and improve existing case management systems while developing plans and gathering user insight for new digital casework systems to replace legacy systems.
• Deploy automation and digital tools to remove low‑value manual work. We will pilot and scale digital and automation solutions that reduce administrative burden and free staff to focus on legal judgement and people.

We will continue to play a leading role in shaping a more effective and sustainable criminal justice system.

Building on established reforms, our focus in 2026–27 will be on embedding new ways of working that improve case progression, reduce unnecessary delay, and support earlier resolution where appropriate. Alongside day‑to‑day delivery, we will work collaboratively with justice partners to share information and data, influence system‑wide change that improves outcomes for victims, witnesses and communities.

Planned improvement activity in 2026-27

• We will expand opportunities for service users to self‑serve and securely access the information they are entitled to, enabling them to better meet their needs. We will roll out new products to the Witness Gateway service including the ability to submit a victim impact statement and witness expenses online. The service will also be extended to High Court cases.
• We will work across the justice sector to support the implementation of the Victims, Witnesses and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025. We will also support the Law Officers with further legislative priorities.
• Develop and implement a Solemn Case Management model. We will apply the lessons from summary case management to redesign solemn case preparation, staffing and assurance, enabling earlier legal decision‑making, clearer reporting standards and more effective use of specialist expertise.

In the following measurement tables, unless otherwise indicated, the 2025-26 performance is the overall average for 1 April 2025- 31 March 2026 and the target will be the average for 2026-27.

Casework timeliness and throughput

Service user experience 

People 

Our structure

In 2025-26 COPFS implemented a new operational structure designed to deliver our objectives and a high-quality service for the people of Scotland.

Financial resources

COPFS is a demand led organisation that is required to meet state obligations to deliver justice and meet reasonable public expectations.  Expenditure is determined by demand and statutory compliance with limited availability for discretionary spend.

COPFS received the following budget allocations for 2026-27, 2027-28 and 2028-29:

Staffing

Staffing levels (full time equivalents) at 28 February 2026 were as follows:

• Senior Civil Servants: 33
• Prosecutors (including trainee solicitors): 800
• Business managers, casework staff and other professional staff: 1766

Total: 2599