Scottish Government

1 Introduction

The Highlands and Islands Area is a large and geographically diverse area spread over the mainland and islands with all offices with the exception of Inverness having three and a half or less members of staff. Many of the offices are located in towns which have their own difficulties relating to the transport and communication infrastructures.

The Area is part of the Grampian, Highlands and Islands Sheriffdom and it covers four local councils: Highland Council, Orkney Council, Shetland Council and Western Isles Council.

There are nine Fiscal Offices in the Area situated at:

• Inverness
• Fort William
• Dingwall (which also covers Portree cases)
• Tain (which also covers Dornoch cases)
• Wick
• Stornoway
• Lochmaddy
• Lerwick
• Kirkwall

The Area covers Sheriff Courts at Dingwall, Dornoch, Fort William, Inverness, Kirkwall, Lerwick, Lochmaddy, Portree, Stornoway, Tain and Wick. Unification ¹ of District and Sheriff Courts has now taken place in Highlands and Islands Area.

The Area Management Team is based in the Inverness office.

The Highlands and Islands Area have identified four key objectives in their 2008/09 Business Plan:

• To secure the confidence of our diverse communities by improving the delivery of justice through timely, efficient and effective prosecution of crime
• To give priority to the prosecution of serious crime, including drugs trafficking and persistent offenders
• To provide services which meet the information needs of victims, witnesses and next of kin, in cooperation with other agencies
• To ensure that all deaths reported to the Procurator Fiscal are investigated appropriately and speedily.

The above objectives are based on the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service objectives and for each the Area has detailed supporting and local targets with a note of risks, controls and how they will evaluate the outcome.

The staffing structure ² for the Highlands and Islands Area is as follows ³:

The Area has set up three on call zones - Northern and Western Isles, North Highland and South Highland. Working partnerships have been developed between staff within these zones. See further at Chapter 7 - Staff Management.

Only the Inverness office is large enough to have discrete operational teams, such as initial case processing, summary and solemn teams. Staff at all other offices require to cover all aspects of the business.

Workload

The Area accounts for about 4.8% of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service caseload and the largest office at Inverness deals with approx 49% of Area cases.

Crown Office statistics ⁴ show that during year April 2007 to March 2008, the Highlands and Islands Area received 15,876 reports. This was a decrease of 5% on the previous year compared with a decrease of 3% in the national average for the same period. The figure can be broken down to office as follows:

For the same period as above there was a decrease of 8% of cases placed on petition (the most serious cases) in the Highlands and Islands Area compared with a national average of -11% and a decrease of 14% of net petitions (cases remaining on petition after further information received and considered) compared with a national average of -16%.

The Area Business Plan 2008/09 indicated that the Area anticipates that the introduction of direct measures and other Summary Justice Reform initiatives will impact on the workload. However it is expected that the administrative capacity freed up by less time required to process summary cases is likely to be taken up in disclosure and solemn business (see also Chapter 7 - Change Management).