Late pleas cost justice system £87m says report

SOME of the £87 million-worth of delays in the justice system is down to lawyers holding up cases by instructing their clients to enter late pleas, a senior Crown Office official has said.

A report by public spending watchdog Audit Scotland found fewer than half (42 per cent) of court appearances proceed as planned, with the delays estimated to have cost £87m last year.

More than half of this cost, £47m, came through late guilty pleas, with £10m lost through witnesses not turning up.

Despite this cost, Catherine Dyer, Crown agent and chief executive of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, told Holyrood’s Audit Committee yesterday that some lawyers instruct their clients to delay entering a plea until they know that witnesses have turned up.

She said: “There is a difficulty with the idea that a late decision is necessarily one that couldn’t have been made earlier.”

She added: “Sometimes it’s about the culture of the defence agent, in terms of the advice they give to their client as to when the plea should be tendered.

“And in a number of them you will find that, perhaps unsurprisingly, if they think that witnesses have a difficulty with turning up their advice seems to be to the client: don’t commit yourself to a decision until we know whether the witnesses have turned up.”

However, she said lawyers do not deliberately instruct witnesses not to appear.

Committee member George Adam said: “We still have this issue where there will be defence agents that will, or at least might possibly, say to witnesses not to come up on a certain day just to keep the case moving.

“That costs money and it keeps things moving – £87m is a lot of money at the end of the day.”

Ms Dyer said: “I don’t think that is a problem at all.”

Mr Adam responded: “Well, I am just a cynic.”

Committee convener Hugh Henry said there was no evidence to suggest that this is the case.