Official Report: Minutes of Evidence

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): I welcome to the meeting Mr Peter May, the accounting officer and permanent secretary in the Department of Justice; Mr Simon Byrne, the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland; and Mr Stephen Herron, the director of the Public Prosecution Service (PPS), all of whom are attending in person.

I also welcome colleagues attending remotely, who are Mr Peter Luney, the chief operating officer in the Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunals Service (NICTS); Mr Glyn Capper, the head of justice performance in DOJ; Chief Superintendent Melanie Jones from the PSNI, who deals with criminal justice matters; and Ms Francesca Keaney, the head of the strategic improvement team in the PPS. Mr Kieran Donnelly, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and Mr Stuart Stevenson, the Treasury Officer of Accounts (TOA) in the Department of Finance, are also in attendance remotely. Good afternoon.

Members, the relevant papers and biographies are in your pack.

I will now ask Mr May, Mr Byrne and Mr Herron to make a statement. I will then open the session for questions. Gentlemen, have you agreed a batting order?

Mr Peter May (Department of Justice): I will make a few introductory comments on behalf of the three of us.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): You are going to speak on behalf of the three.

Mr May: We understood that you preferred short introductory comments, so that is how we have planned it.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): OK. The floor is yours, Peter.

Mr May: Thanks very much for the invitation to discuss the Northern Ireland Audit Office (NIAO) report 'Speeding up justice'. Delay is undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges facing the justice system. It is a priority for the Department, its criminal justice partners and the Criminal Justice Board (CJB). The speed at which cases progress matters to victims and witnesses, their families and their communities. It can also help offenders to better understand the implications of their actions in a timely fashion.

The Committee recognises that reducing delay is a challenging and complex issue and that reforms take time to embed and for their impact to be seen. There is no silver bullet to resolve the issue, and we are delivering a series of steps, all of which are designed to improve delay and the victim experience. I can reassure you of a strong and shared determination to make improvements, led at the most senior levels of the justice system by those who attend the Criminal Justice Board, including the Minister, the Lord Chief Justice and the three of us who are here today. You are aware that we have prioritised delay for a long time. As an indication of progress, prior to COVID-19, the average overall time to complete criminal cases fell for five successive quarters, from 169 days in December 2018 to 149 days in March 2020. That is a 12% reduction and was the fastest time for four years. It shows that our reforms are beginning to make a difference.

Although overall performance was improving, the time taken for some cases, particularly some Crown Court cases, remains high, and that is a particular focus. An important factor in those crimes is their increasing complexity. Total recorded crimes have remained reasonably constant over recent years, but there have been significant increases in crimes that take longer to investigate and progress, such as violent and sexual offences and drug offences. There is no doubt that COVID-19, unfortunately, will have had a negative impact on delay. In the face of those unprecedented challenges, however, the justice system responded quickly and innovatively to introduce improvements that will have long-term benefits. We will be happy to talk more about those during this session.

In its report, the Audit Office provided some important recommendations, and I thought that it would be helpful to share examples of some of the improvements that we have made since the report was written. First, it acknowledged the work undertaken to develop a performance framework to measure delay. We have continued to build on that by introducing new performance analysis dashboards, which have been an important tool in driving improvements. Secondly, we have introduced case progression officers in each Crown Court region. Thirdly, we have introduced the Criminal Justice (Committal Reform) Bill to the Assembly to improve the experience of victims and witnesses and to help tackle delay. Fourthly, collaborative working, a key theme of the Audit Office report, has been taken forward through a number of speeding up justice programme initiatives.

I will give you a couple of examples. Crown Court case performance groups were established in 2019 and are chaired by the judiciary in each area. They bring together justice agencies and defence lawyers to lead performance improvements at a local level. Furthermore, the Working Together project board, which is chaired jointly by the PSNI and the PPS, continues to drive improvements in file quality and in the effectiveness of decision-making. Following a successful indictable cases pilot (ICP), the indictable cases process now operates in all court areas. Evaluation shows that the cases from 2017 to 2019 were completed 26% faster than similar cases completed in 2014-15.

In summary, the Audit Office report rightly highlighted that delay is one of the key challenges facing the justice system. We all recognise that more needs to be done, but I hope that, in this brief introduction, I have highlighted some of the improvements that the system has made and is continuing to make. Simon, Stephen and I are now happy to try to answer your questions.

Mr Hilditch: You are very welcome this afternoon, gentlemen. It is nice to see you. One of the areas of criticism has been the quality of investigation files, and I have picked this question because I have been involved in a few cases in my constituency, and it has been brought to my attention. I can see how the public could be frustrated by the process. The quality of investigation files prepared by the PSNI and the way in which PSNI officers work with their counterparts in the PPS has long been identified as a shortcoming that contributes to poor performance, as indicated by the report, going back some considerable time. Chief Constable, from your point of view, why has that been allowed to happen and potentially to fester since the publication of the report three years ago? What is being done about it?

Chief Constable Simon Byrne (Police Service of Northern Ireland): I will leave it to others to explain some of the reasons from the past, because, to me, coming in at the point that I did, I had to bring some of my personal experience. The Chair mentioned biographies earlier, but I have chaired criminal justice boards in two other places: in London and in my previous life. I have to say that the level of cooperation and collaboration across the system is pretty impressive. Stephen and I meet regularly. We have a strong working relationship, and that extends through Peter's team and into the Courts Service.

You have to look at where we were and to where we have come. You can see some of the figures in detail. For example, you will be aware that there are five stages, and you can go back a few years. In 2014-15, the average was 10 days, and it is now 93, so, at first sight, it has got worse. Our assessment is that, compared with the past, we are putting more in at the front end to get case files ready to go to Stephen. In the past, we might have got a file into the system but it would have too many deficiencies. In a typical case now — you referenced your personal experience — there are probably, although it sometimes depends, about five levels of checking from the point of call. A victim might ring 999, and there is then an assessment done to deploy an officer. That officer will take a crime report, which itself is assessed, and it is closed early if there are no immediate lines of inquiry. For the purposes of today, when the case is investigated, there are various routes to what we call secondary investigation, which is about tracing witnesses, finding the suspect and collecting other evidence.

Since the report in 2018, we have put in different layers to improve all sorts of things that affect Stephen's part of the picture. If you look at the first point of contact into file preparation, we have now invested in case progression officers and in dedicated decision makers. They are sergeants and inspectors who either look locally at how investigations are directed or act as a gatepost between us and the PPS and look at standards.

In his introduction, Peter mentioned the Working Together project. It is co-chaired by one of our assistant chief constables and a colleague from the PPS. It has a programme of work that looks at such things as minimum file build and standardised requirements for a file before it goes to the PPS. If it is an assault case, for example, have you got evidence from the victim, as well as medical evidence? Have you got the CCTV footage? There has been a lot of emphasis on quality, on improved supervision and on less waste in the system. We have a performance management system, through which we track. We might come on to it later. When a file goes from the police to the Public Prosecution Service, there will sometimes be requests back asking whether it can see something else or get more of something. We monitor the system regularly to see that those requests are managed so that there is a timely process for remedying a gap in a file.

There are two processes across the country for the volume crime that affects many people that you might talk to. In Belfast, which deals with a quarter of the crime for the whole country, we have the case progression team. Some 88 police officers deal with the investigation of volume crime, which includes burglary, theft and robbery. They gather further evidence and submit the file to the occurrence management team, which, again, quality-assures it. That team finalises things and makes sure that the right forms are filled in and ready to go to Stephen's colleagues. The other route to go is via the various specialist teams. It might be the rape case unit or the domestic abuse team, where similar things are done to ensure quality.

When we have looked at that, since the publication of the report, we saw that there were clearly gaps around timeliness. A performance regime looks at that. One of the big things, and it is not unique to here, having played out heavily in the past couple of years in England and Wales, is adequate disclosure. Again, working with Stephen's team, we have put a lot of emphasis on training about disclosure. In specialist teams, for example, where disclosure is often more complex, there is training provided to make sure that disclosure happens at the start of the investigation and not 30 days before the court case. By way of a snapshot, in an average year, we train about 1,300 police officers, from new recruits to established teams of detectives or supervisors, in all the requirements. We estimate that, since the report, we have invested about £23 million of resource into the various levels of file development, investigation and checking. That is outwith some of the bigger teams that you may be familiar with, such as the public protection branch or the terrorism investigation unit.

There has been a lot of front-end emphasis, and it continues. Along with Stephen, we co-developed the Causeway management information system. Through that, we can monitor individual, team, area, district or group performance around a range of indicators, such as file build, timeliness, supervisory checks and whether a file will be late, if, for example, it is one for which time may run out. We have recently introduced a Northern Ireland panel for all the assistant chief constables to look at. We call it a tier-2 measure. For example, it asks, "How many offenders do you have that are still wanted after 30, 60 or 90 days?", because, when you get into the meat of this, it is like a big funnel. Although it is important to victims, the quicker that we get offenders, collect evidence and get it into the system, the quicker that it gets to Stephen's teams and the quicker that it is then processed and gets into the courts. As I said, that is a snapshot of some of the things that we are doing.

Mr Hilditch: Thank you. We will probably talk about systems and performance shortly. From a PSNI point of view, do you have any criticisms? Do you look at the coalface to see whether some of it may be down to human error or practice and perhaps not be up to standard? That concerns me from the point of view of the local constabulary, given that England and Wales seem to be in a much better place. I would not like to think that officers in Northern Ireland are any worse off than their counterparts across the water. Do you identify that at all?

Chief Constable Byrne: For me, personally and professionally, the kernel of some of this is that it is about a service to victims, and victim care, as Peter touched on. Before we even get to the criminal justice part, you can take out a chunk of work on crime prevention. There has been a big emphasis on that in the past couple of years, because, ideally, you want to stop crime happening in the first place.

Put that to one side, however. The whole interaction with the victim in the early phase can set the route, or otherwise, for a successful prosecution. The Committee has the figures. At times, there are delays, particularly in Crown Court cases. Those delays bring a different pressure to keep the witness informed and confident about giving evidence and put a different pressure on the people who might support them in that process.

You mentioned error. We will routinely audit and monitor the first point of contact decisions, such as whether the crime is recorded correctly. Earlier, I mentioned the occurrence management team, and it is based in four parts of the country. It will assess the level of harm in the crime and try to allocate it to an officer with the requisite level of skills. For example, a shoplifting case is more likely to go to a local policing team, on which there may be more probationary officers. The skill set to investigate shoplifting is different from that for a complex rape or a serious assault on someone. We look at all of that, and we also track. For example, when there is a dialogue between us, the timeliness of our responses to Stephen's team is important. Dialogue can vary from minor queries asking where something is to more fundamental issues, such as submitting a file without evidence.

Under the Working Together project, all the files that we send should ideally be ticked. There are still occasions when officers will submit files directly to the PPS that have not gone through the gateway, and those files will be returned. The latest figures that I have show that to be at about 13%, so we are trying to work out how to close that route to avoid any bypass of the checking process. On front-end errors and things, the district or area performance meetings are chaired by a chief superintendent or a superintendent, who will look at error rates, timeliness and file quality. We cannot do it today, but we can look at other ways in which to facilitate that. The Causeway system lets us drill into that information. For example, if an officer is routinely late with paperwork, the system allows us to spot that. If there is feedback about poor victim care, there are ways in which to track that. In all that we are doing at the moment, I would like to think that there is good dialogue, particularly between us and Stephen's team. We are looking for good practice.

You referred to England and Wales, and that is interesting. You will get the sense from the report that sometimes what are like-for-like comparisons are within the bounds of similarity but relate to different bits of law. What is sometimes lost is the fact that we charge one in five people who commit crimes, and that is double the figure in England and Wales. Our charge rate is about 20% of all crime, whereas it is at 7% to 10% in England and Wales at the moment. There are reasons for that, partly because more alternatives are offered to police officers in England and Wales to deal with low-level crime outside the courts system. As a message to victims here, that percentage is pretty impressive and has been stable. The key crime types that affect victims and that are of acute public concern are, for example, the charge rate for domestic abuse, which has been consistently improving over the past couple of years.

Mr Hilditch: Thank you. The report highlighted the fact that there was no reliable performance information for the interface between the PSNI and the PPS. Is that system now in place, and what has been learnt from that? My question is potentially for Simon and Stephen.

Mr Stephen Herron (Public Prosecution Service): Thank you for the question. Simon has outlined how there have been great improvements since the report was commissioned and published in 2018. We are, however, working on continual improvement. On occasion, we have to look back at the improvement initiatives that we have tried and undertake quality assurance to see whether they have worked. If the improvement has not worked, we will tweak it.

We have become much better at doing that over recent years, instead of looking back at the problems with historical cases. Problems are emerging. There is a big issue now with the amount of digital material that has to be examined. As Simon said, there is early engagement. One of our concerns is that the Audit Office report is primarily about Crown Court cases. First, the system is adversarial. The DOJ is part of the system that devises criminal justice policy, and the practitioners primarily are operational partners, such as the police, us, the defence, the courts and the judiciary. There are therefore a lot of different moving parts in the criminal justice system. What we have in common, as Peter said in his opening remarks, is a commitment to ensuring that we tackle avoidable delay.

The word "avoidable" is important here, because there will be some unavoidable delay in cases, just by their nature. It is the same in every jurisdiction.

As to how we are doing, as Peter outlined, we were going in the right direction pre-COVID. That had taken a lot of work. Although we measure the criminal justice process in five phases, and we have performance measurement indicators for how we are doing in those five phases, a lot of inefficiency has been highlighted in the report, because matters sometimes have to go back and forth.

Your first question was about engagement on file quality, and that is where we have really made big inroads. There are five principles of the ICP that Peter mentioned, but the two that involve PPS primarily are early engagement with the PSNI and early engagement with the defence. Simon touched on early engagement with the PSNI. Crime is getting more complex in the Crown Court. In routine cases, evidential file standards are agreed between us, so, by and large, the police will know what is expected in a file. Where they need more bespoke advice, we have a duty to get prosecutorial advice and engage with police early on that. What needs to be done more, however, is to bring in the defence on the discussions about how we do a proportionate file build, because, at the minute, some of the inefficiencies that we are talking about come from overdoing file build. The culture here is that we and the police tend to do work not just on every reasonable line of inquiry but on how to make sure that the case is robust enough to withstand a number of attacks from the defence or a number of challenges from multiple angles.

Mr Hilditch: Is a bar set that you deem to be too high? Should it be lower?

Mr Herron: We now need to move to a position, if we are going to be like England and Wales. I will explain what is happening in Wales. We will probably come back to committal reform, but it took about 10 years, from 2003 to 2013, to implement committal reform there. There was then a review of efficiency in criminal proceedings in 2015, and it identified four main principles: getting it right first time; case ownership; a duty of direct engagement; and consistent judicial case management. Those are the four principles that we built the ICP around. In 2018, we added a better case management handbook. Even in England and Wales, you can see that it has taken a long time to make the improvements that they have now.

We are getting there with the police. It is the duty of direct engagement that we need to move on to now, because what we have been doing has been done on a voluntary basis up to this point. We need to have a little more structure around that. We certainly have some of the processes in place that should see improvement, but what we really need to tackle now is the culture, in a different way than before.

Mr Hilditch: The indictable cases pilot is mentioned in the report. It was suggested that there would be development of better investigation file quality and more effective collaborative working between the two organisations. Has that pilot been evaluated?

Mr Herron: It has, but, again, because there has been a year of COVID disruption, there have not been as many Crown Court cases going through. The indictable cases process will evolve slightly. ICP is not in every case. The pilot in 2015 was a geographical pilot. In 2017, we decided to concentrate on the types of offences that were linked to paramilitary crime.

Mr Hilditch: Was that decision linked to the pilot?

Mr Herron: No. The pilot showed us in 2015 that there could be very significant timeliness gains, but it had, if you like, everybody prioritising everything. We had very close working between a small team of police and prosecutors, with priority being given in forensics, for example, to exhibits that were being put in. It produced tremendous results, but they are not really scalable, because you cannot prioritise everything in the system. In 2017, there was therefore a recommendation in Fresh Start that we concentrate on cases that are related to paramilitary crime. We are talking not necessarily about terrorist cases but about the paramilitary crime that we have in the community.

Mr Hilditch: Basically, criminals.

Mr Herron: Yes. We concentrate on drugs offences, violent offences and drugs being taken in and out of prison. The figures that Simon talked about for 2017-19 can be skewed somewhat. As the report showed, there is an improvement in timeliness in charge cases, as opposed to summons cases. A lot of the cases in that ICP evaluation were charge cases. When we look at the next iteration of ICP, we will therefore have to align it with committal reform. When that comes in, we will have an indictable cases process that will supplement and support committal reform. About 25% of all cases involving indictable-only offences in the Crown Court will be captured by an initial phase of committal reform, and we will have a bespoke ICP to try to match that.

Mr Hilditch: Thank you, gentlemen.

Chief Constable Byrne: May I mention two instances to build on? You talked about the performance stuff. We can follow up on that. Under the Working Together project, there are three strands of measurable performance improvement, which are improve quality, improve effectiveness and reduce delay. There are therefore measures that will show the relationship between us and the PPS across a range of things.

You will come to your own conclusions, but we have invested heavily in the dedicated decision-maker idea, which primarily deals with summary crime. One of the measures there that I thought you might find it interesting is the percentage of agreement between our recommendations for prosecution and those of the PPS. The baseline is set at 97%, but, across the different types of crime, the average is 92%. In over nine out of 10 cases, we are therefore in agreement, so the variance is low. Even for the decisions on which there is no prosecution, it is 96%. The bit that Stephen was talking about, which was police understanding of evidential test and quality of the file, makes for quite an interesting statistic.

COVID has, for various reasons, skewed a lot of the trajectory, but, last November, a piece of work was done, and Peter will probably come back to this. A dip sample was done of 100 "not guilty" investigation files. That proved some areas of learning, which we are now looking at, that go back to the original commitments under Working Together, but they look at whether supervisory standards are good enough; that make sure that there is compliance with the agreed file bill, because that reduces waste; and that look at how we improve the team performance management at district level. That continuous improvement ethos, I would like to say, is something that is there.

Mr Hilditch: Thank you for bringing that to our attention.

Mr Muir: Thank you all for coming along today. Apologies for sitting behind you. I appreciate your coming here. The fact that the Public Accounts Committee is considering this issue again highlights the fact that it is not simple and cannot be resolved easily. It is complex, and it has lots of parts to it.

I have a couple of questions. The Northern Ireland Audit Office report that we are considering states:

I am interested in your views as to why that is. Is it more the case that we want to ensure that, when we bring cases to trial, only the guilty are convicted, or what is the background? Northern Ireland is unique in many ways. That line in the report is quite a stark statement.

Mr Herron: I am happy to address that. We compare very favourably with England and Wales in Crown Court conviction rates. It was over 86% last year, and it is usually around the 85% mark, and it has been either side of that for the past number of years. When they get to the Crown Court, cases will plead at some stage. You can overbuild cases. You can put too much preparation into them, which is obviously a big drain on resources. It takes longer then for them to get through the system, and that is not fair on anybody.

At the heart of this, however, lies the right to a fair trial. We are all sure that more speed should not result in sacrificing the quality. There is a difference between having an effective justice system and having an efficient one, although there is some interrelation. All of us are doing all that we can to move delay on, but we certainly do not want it to be done at the expense of effectiveness. I give you an example from England and Wales. Cases were moving that quickly that disclosure — unused material in a case — was not able to be looked at until quite late in the process, and cases had to be reviewed and stopped while they were before the court. That can lead to a crisis of confidence.

Getting that balance right will require us to work with the defence because, whilst it is an adversarial system and they have every right to defend a client and ensure that they contest the prosecution's case, there does have to be early engagement in order to narrow the issues that are being contested between the prosecution and the defence.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Excuse me, Mr Herron. I know that there is a problem with the layout of the room in complying with the COVID regulations, but we need you to speak into the microphone, otherwise your evidence may not be heard.

Mr Herron: I apologise. I was just saying that we need to involve the defence, perhaps, in a greater way than we have heretofore. None of this is new; it has been tried in England and Wales, and it has been a difficult and slow journey there. It is an adversarial system, but you have to get the defence in because what you have in common is article 6, which is the right to a fair trial, which should be within a reasonable time. There is room for that.

Simon mentioned disclosure, and there is a national disclosure improvement forum in England and Wales, which we are a part of. The defence sit on that. That is the level of engagement that we have. Again, pre-COVID disruption, we had Crown Court liaison committees, which were led by a very senior criminal judge. The defence were on that, and we had a protocol for dealing with vulnerable witnesses, which was a product of that. So, there is a mechanism there, but if we are really going to tackle delay and inefficiency, we have to stop the back and forth where we engage with the police, anticipating what the defence case might be. That might require us to ask the police to get further evidence, but, then, we do not know what the defence are taking issue with until a much later stage.

You have to concertina the five stages to make sure that they are done in much closer time. Every time somebody has to lift a file, when there has been a gap between a prosecutor reading a file, for example, asking the police to get more material, it takes time for the police to do that. It goes back to the prosecutor, who has to read it again, and then the matter goes to court. The defence tell us what they are taking issue with, and we, perhaps, have to go back to the police again, who may have to go to forensics or get a medical report. All those things go back and forth, which leads to greater inefficiency. We have to front-load the work and try to get it done in a way that is truly collaborative, which is going to involve the defence in a different way from what we are doing at the moment.

Mr Muir: It is an important issue. I am probably old enough to remember the history of policing and our courts and justice in Northern Ireland. We are in much better days now in relation to that. However, the challenge around the cultural issues is still there, including around human rights compliance in Northern Ireland. That is not to say that it does not occur in other parts of the United Kingdom, but there is more of an acute focus on that, and it would be unfair to criticise the policing and justice system for taking cognisance of that issue and the need to ensure that there is confidence in the judicial system, which has already been outlined by the Chief Constable and by Peter.

COVID-19 came along over a year ago, and it has had a dramatic impact on policing and justice. There is a significant backlog and the only thing that can be blamed for that is the need to protect other people's health. Has there been any learning from COVID-19 about how we can do things better and embed that going forward? Do you have any examples of how we can do that? We are all used to Zoom now, but I did not even know what it was at the start. Are we embedding things in our system that will allow us to deal with those issues?

Mr May: I will pick up on that to start with, and colleagues can add to it. You are right that we saw a substantial increase in the number of cases before the courts as a result of COVID. At 1 April 2021, there were approximately 10,500 defendants in the court system, compared with 8,300 at 1 April 2020. At the peak, at 1 October 2020, it was as high as 12,000, so we have already seen a significant reduction in the overall number of cases through the actions that have been taken through the Criminal Justice Board and all the partner agencies that are involved. In the Magistrates' Courts, in particular, we have made some quite substantial inroads into the backlog. It is more challenging with Crown Court cases; you will understand that it is only relatively recently that jury trials have been able to resume in bulk.

You asked about what we have learned as a result of COVID. One of the key areas is around the better use of technology and digital platforms. We have broadened the use of live links in courts to ensure that, where possible, court cases can continue using remote access for defendants, victims and witnesses. There is an ongoing operation of a range of new initiatives, such as digital telephone systems, which the PSNI is leading on, a review of court cases and no-prosecution clinics, which is a joint PSNI and PPS initiative. Colleagues may want to say something about one or more of those initiatives that they have been involved in. Those are areas where we will not just go back to the old way of doing things when, or if, the threat of COVID recedes. We will look to build on those initiatives and find new ways of working.

Indeed, one of the other things that has been taken forward is how digital evidence gets transferred from the PSNI to the PPS. We also have in place well-advanced plans for how evidence is transferred from the PPS to the defence and from the PPS to the court. Those sorts of changes will make a real difference. In a year or two, you will not see barristers straining under three feet of paper in court on many occasions; on many more occasions, they will be taking in a tablet or computer and accessing the information that they need by those means.

Chief Constable Byrne: Do you want a few specifics?

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Yes.

Chief Constable Byrne: One of my areas of reflection in the past 15 months has been adaption. The focus of the three of us and others — at one point, it was the main focus of the Criminal Justice Board — was on how you kept the system running whilst adapting for both the here and now and beyond. There have been some encouraging innovations, including remote evidence centres, which allow police officers to give evidence from police stations, so you are reducing travel time. That is mostly used for High Court bail hearings, but the plan is to extend it to all hearings.

Mr Hilditch talked about victims, and I am particularly keen on the idea that, rather than a victim coming to the police, we fully come to you so that you can adapt and treat it as you would any other transaction in any other part of your life. So, we can have telephone statements and a digital signature. That might seem like it has taken a bit long, but there are other elements —.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Sorry to interrupt you, Chief Constable, but, realistically, do the police have the resources to do that?

Chief Constable Byrne: Yes. If you treat these things as operating in tandem, one of the big investments that Peter knows I have wanted to make since I have been here is in digital policing; there is a strategic case for more officers, but there is another one for digital policing. We can bring the sort of technology to front-line officers and staff that most of us have in our pocket or handbags. It is about how we exploit technology. If you look at social media, you may see the example of a trial of ruggedised laptops for front-line officers. So, they can come into your home, take a statement there and submit it back to a call centre or custody centre, probably faster than the prisoner, whom we have just arrested, was driving. We know that, with the limitation of typing, you would not try to take a complex statement for a sexual crime like that, but for crimes like basic assaults and thefts that is something that we would like to see grow this year. We have taken 90 digital statements using the new system to give to the PPS. Use of that will grow, but there is an impediment, at the moment, due to a licensing issue. We can also do voluntary interviews at a solicitor's office, where the suspect goes to the solicitor and takes part in an online interview, which, again, saves travel time.

Underpinning the Committee's scrutiny is our productivity and value for money. The interesting initiative with volume is a system called Box, which is a staged development in the electronic transfer of information, initially between us and Stephen's colleagues and, eventually, the defence. So, as well as being able to move paper, we will be able to start moving body-worn video evidence and CCTV images so that, eventually, the whole file becomes electronic for both the system and the courts. The intention is to progress transferring to the defence in the near future.

We may come back to this during the afternoon, but the other thing that we have learned is that the issue underpinning a lot of this is the volume of work in the system and how you shift it in other ways. I touched on the difference between charge rates here and those in England and Wales, but 10% of our work is on traffic crime; for example, careless driving. A fixed penalty notice for careless driving, for example, would take out volume, which would create more capacity to deal with things that, perhaps, need more attention. I talked to Infrastructure Minister Nichola Mallon, only yesterday, about support for changing legislation to enable us to use more fixed penalty notices for minor road-traffic issues in order to concentrate on more serious crime and harm in the justice system. The innovation has been one of the takeaways from COVID, and we want to see that continue.

Mr Muir: My final question probably relates to that issue. The Criminal Justice (Committal Reform) Bill is going through the Assembly. This place did not sit for three years. It came back in January of last year, and we all welcomed that. How much impact will the Committal Reform Bill have on what you are doing, and how much did the lack of devolution, the ability to pass legislation and to have Ministers in place impact on the issues that we are talking about?

Mr May: I will pick up on that in the first instance. We believe that committal reform will make a difference to delay. There is a good example. We have all talked about the complexity of the justice system. The easy answer on committal reform, and the big benefit that will be seen immediately, is that no victims or witnesses will have to give oral evidence at the point of committal. The fear that they will have to give evidence more than once — even if, in practice, it does not happen very often — affects a lot of victims and witnesses.

The implementation of committal reform, assuming that the Bill that is before the Assembly gets through, will take time. It is a complex area. We have four separate work streams that are taking forward changes to IT, court rules and legal aid rules and a bigger, behavioural-change approach. Committal reform will fundamentally affect the way that the police and, in particular, the PPS operate. We need to make sure that, in making the transition, we are not simply transferring cases to the Crown Court earlier in order to gum up the Crown Court. Stephen has been a helpful voice on the Criminal Justice Board in trying to make sure that we understand that complexity and address it in all the different dimensions.

Once the Bill becomes an Act, it may be 18 months or two years before we are able to fully implement committal reform. As I said, we will take that first step, on oral evidence, immediately. For my part, it will make a difference. We have seen, as Stephen said, that it took 10 years in England and Wales to roll it out properly. We have seen it make a difference, despite the fact that, initially, people were sceptical about whether it would make a change. Stephen, do you want to add anything to that?

Mr Herron: I think that you have explained it fairly comprehensively, Peter. We see great benefits in abolishing oral evidence at committal. Sometimes, from the victim's perspective, they have to give evidence twice. We previously gave evidence to the Justice Committee specifically about that additional trauma for, first and foremost, victims and witnesses. We do not think that it serves any benefit. We think that the checks and balances in the Crown Court ensure that any issues that the defence has with the prosecution case can be tested there. A contested committal hearing, with oral evidence in the Magistrates' Court, is not needed. Quite often, a complainant or victim was asked to give oral evidence, but when they turned up to do that, they were not required, and the case went through. It adds to the stress and trauma of somebody who is going through the system.

That will make a measurable contribution to tackling delay. It will be the single biggest assister to us in getting cases into the Crown Court more quickly, but, as Peter said, we need to ensure that we are match fit for that. Part of that is the things that we are doing on a voluntary basis at the minute — the engagement between ourselves and the police and PPS and the defence, for example — having to become mandatory. The principles that we discussed, of getting it right first time, case ownership, direct engagement and effective case management, will all have to be in place because, as I noted that we found in England and Wales, proceeding at speed can come at a cost to the principles of justice and ensuring that there is not a miscarriage of justice. That is the balancing act that must be done.

We have a long way to go in trying to get cases into the Crown Court more quickly, but the Lord Chief Justice made it clear to the Justice Committee that that is what we need to do, because that is where cases can be effectively managed. For want of a better analogy, the defence and prosecution get their heads banged together if they do not already have things sorted and the issues narrowed. In England and Wales, having a judge there to make you do that has been the most effective way of making sure that there is success.

Mr Muir: I recall the first job that I ever had, in the 1990s. On the first day, I was told by the manager, "Either do something correctly and do it properly or just don't bother doing it at all". I think that that is the case with this. If you do something half-heartedly, you will feel the consequences afterwards. I think that it is notable that the committal reform stuff was done in England and Wales a number of years ago, so we are catching up here, now that devolution has been restored. As you said, if the Bill is passed, that is just the start of the whole process. I think that it is important to note that.

Mr May: Some of us recall that, as part of the Justice Act 2015, some legislation was passed on committal reform, but the attempt was made to go further and to abolish oral evidence. At that time, the Assembly did not agree to that. There was a proposition by Minister Ford at that time, and it was not accepted. We believe that there is now a wider acceptance of the need for committal reform.

Ms Flynn: Thanks to the panel for your attendance at the Committee today. I will pick up on a couple of points that I noted down as you were answering previous questions. Peter, it is good to hear that it has been, for a long time, a priority for the Department to deal with the delays. That 12% reduction certainly is showing improvements, which is good to note. The report says that some of the poor-quality case files from the PSNI were highlighted as far back as 2006. It has been mentioned a few times that there has been an increase in complexity in the cases that you are dealing with. Are the local crime patterns shifting? Is that specific to us, here in the North, or are different parts of Britain seeing some of those same patterns and undergoing some of those same challenges as a result of the complexity of the cases? That is my first question. Thank you.

Chief Constable Byrne: It is probably better if I take that to start with. I think that that is a really interesting point because we have seen quite stark changes in the patterns of crime over the period of the report. I will give you information from year-end 2019 to try to keep it consistent with some of the reporting periods. Violence against the person had gone up 40%. Sexual offences had gone up 84%. Possession of weapons, which, frankly, is a reflection of police activity, had gone up nearly 50%. Drugs offences went up by 125%. As you might expect, more traditional types of crime such as theft, robbery and burglary have fallen, and that pattern has continued up to the present day.

I think that the really interesting point that is hidden behind this is that you have a shift in the type of crime. We touched on the need to get the right sort of evidence and to get disclosure right. Personally, I think that there are some other stark facts that go with the change in the nature of crime, which is the online element to an investigation. That is not scam-type crime, where I use my computer to try to trick you into being my bank. It is that, because of the nature of life these days, there is often a telephone footprint or something similar to crime. Some of the changes are enormous. With violence against the person, including harassment-type cases, the percentage chain where there is an online element is 624%. So, there is a need to examine a phone. The online element to sexual offences has gone up 325%, and some of the issues around drug crime and threats are of a similar scale. So, the overall impact on us has been nearly a 500% increase between 2014 and the end of 2020 on that online element.

You might say that that is a change in the nature of work for the police, but the other thing that goes with it is that, at the same time, we have invested in cyber investigation units. Sixty officers do that at different sites across the country. To give you some sense of what that means, based on last year's year-end figures, we currently examine, on average, 4,777 mobile phones, 904 computers and 11,000-plus items of CCTV. That is significant.

There is some good news. A lot of work has been done on investment for first-point-of-contact triage. Working with colleagues, we have made significant reductions to backlogs and improvements to timeliness for the examination of devices. In 2019, it took 27·4 days to examine a typical mobile phone. At the end of January 2020, it took just five days. That is a big change. The backlog of devices in the system has gone down by a third, and the backlog of computers in the system has also gone down by a third. Where we have identified problems and changes, we have adapted our tactics to meet them. There is always more to do, but those are quite stark figures that show how life has changed during the reporting period. So much can now be proved by some element of mobile phone imagery or something akin to that, or it can, at least, put a suspect as having been somewhere near a crime.

Ms Flynn: Thank you for that, Simon. Some of those statistics are really reassuring. You can see the progress even in the fact that, in a short space of time, examinations of mobile phones went from 27 days to five days.

You mentioned the investment in some of those initiatives. Earlier, you mentioned £23 million of investment. Was that specifically in relation to trying to speed up the case file process, or did that take into account some of the facts and figures that you mentioned around the IT and cyber elements?

Chief Constable Byrne: It is a blend of both. For example, at the moment, out of that £23 million, the total cost of the cyber support unit is just shy of £4 million. If you want further information on the breakdown of the £23 million, I can get that to the Committee. It is a combination of the file build and the specific bit around digital examination as part of the new cost that has gone in.

Ms Flynn: Thanks for that. The case progression officers who are now in place were mentioned a few times. Simon, you mentioned 88 officers. Is that 88 case progression officers in total? When were those posts first introduced? You gave a breakdown of what their role was in finalising forms and sending information on to specialist teams. Hopefully, that has streamlined some of the process. Are there 88 case progression officers? When were those posts first introduced? Will they be long-term posts?

Mr May: The figure of 88 relates specifically to police officers who were involved in case management. Simon can say more about those 88 police officers.

When I talked about case progression officers in my opening remarks, I was referring to civil servants who support the judiciary in key areas. Initially, there were pilots in Belfast, Craigavon and Newry — two Crown Court areas — and we have now introduced case progression officers in each of the six Crown Court regions. There are six case progression officers. They are in Antrim, Belfast, Coleraine, Craigavon, Dungannon and Newry. They are there to try to remove some of the administrative burden from the judiciary and to try to interface between the PPS and the defence in particular, to make sure that cases are ready to progress at the next hearing, or to understand the challenges that may exist.

To clarify, those six are separate from the 88 that Simon talked about. Simon, you might want to say something more about your officers and how they operate.

Chief Constable Byrne: One of the issues with the system is that there is a lot of jargon and many acronyms. The case progression teams are part of a Belfast initiative that came into place in 2018. They cover all the crimes within the Belfast district. They effectively deal with volume crime: theft, burglaries, robberies, car crime and that sort of thing. That is where the figure of 88 comes from.

There is a separate model for the outer-Belfast areas because of the different geography and things. They are called the volume crime support teams. They have 67 officers at the moment, but there is some work going on to see how we harmonise that, because their terms of reference are slightly different. There is a lot of confidence in the Belfast model. The assistant chief constable who leads on the criminal justice force at the moment is looking to see how we get the best standardisation across the country. The roles are similar, but they are marginally different, so we are looking at how we can adapt that in the months ahead.

Ms Flynn: Thanks for that. My final question is for Stephen. You mentioned the Crown Court liaison committees that were in place pre-COVID. When they were in place and activated, did they help to speed up the process of court hearings? COVID will have had an impact on them. Have you any plans to resume the work of those committees, if they helped to streamline the process?

Mr Herron: Yes, certainly. That was a judicial initiative. The Lord Chief Justice introduced two groups. There was the Crown Court liaison committee, which was trying to get a consensus among the PPS, judiciary, defence and other interested parties, including the courts, about how we could more effectively deal with certain case types. A practice direction came out of that, to help us deal with vulnerable witnesses in particular. It was trying to put a lot more structure around how the defence and prosecution would take various actions to get cases before the court in a way that they were case-ready. It is based on the principle of fewer, more-effective hearings.

There were also Crown Court performance groups, which were chaired by judges at a local level, to see whether there were any issues in particular court areas that could be resolved locally. Because of COVID, both were suspended, but at the last Criminal Justice Board, the Lord Chief Justice had plans to get those up and running. They provide a basis for us to move to the next phase that is required for committal reform, of building on that. We need to look at Crown Court rules and further practice directions. It is a very appropriate vehicle to deliver that work.

Mr May: Let me say something more about the performance groups in particular. They mean that, in each local court area, they will give a set of performance data for their area that will demonstrate how long different cases take, and they will benchmark those against the Northern Ireland average. That provides, essentially, an obvious opportunity for people to say, "Why is it that our area is so much slower than another, in respect of this type of case or that?" It should act as a good incentive for performance improvement. It is a form of competition, I guess, in one way or another. People naturally do not want to be the slowest but want to be at the top of the league table, subject to Stephen's points about maintaining the quality of performance along the way.

Those performance groups will have that opportunity. As Stephen said, they have not met for the last year, but they will start to meet again shortly.

Ms Flynn: That is great. Thank you very much to the panel.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): It is my understanding that the number of cases waiting to go to the Crown Court is up by 50%.

Mr May: I am not sure whether I have that figure to hand, Chair. Let me see whether I can find it. There are some figures about that. It is just a question of whether I can identify them.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): While you are looking for that, if that is true, and it is my understanding, what is the reason for it?

Mr Herron: If we go back to what was happening in the courts when lockdown came in, in March last year, there was a need to focus on urgent business that was before the court. Obviously, the message was that we should work from home. A lot of public buildings were closed down because they were not compliant with the health and safety guidance that was in effect. Normally, there would be 12 Crown Courts running throughout Northern Ireland, dealing with an average of 1,500 cases a year. From March right up until the summer of last year, no Crown Court work was done because they had to adapt. A lot of court space is needed to bring a jury in for a Crown Court trial. A lot of work had to be done by the judiciary and the Court Service to adapt courts.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): OK. I accept that point. Does that figure of 50% sound right to you?

Mr May: There is certainly a significant increase in the number of Crown Court cases —.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Are you saying that the figure of 50% is entirely down to COVID?

Mr May: I quoted some figures earlier, comparing the number of cases in April 2020 with that in April 2021. The difference in those figures is absolutely down to COVID.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): What I am asking you is whether the 50% is entirely down to COVID?

Mr May: I am trying to find the precise figures for the increase. The difference between April 2020 and April 2021 is down to COVID. In relation to Crown Court cases more generally, we recognise that we have made some quite good progress on Crown Court charge cases, and we have been able to reduce the time taken for the average case in those areas quite significantly. It is the best that it has been since the recording of the data began. However, we have a big problem in relation to summons cases.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): I ask you, between yourselves, to confirm, in writing to us, the 50% figure and the reason for it.

Mr May: Of course.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): I understand that the average Crown Court case in Northern Ireland is adjourned six times. How does that compare with the mainland, and why is that?

Mr Herron: The big mantra on the mainland is "fewer, more effective hearings". Part of the reason for the difference — we have perhaps touched on it — is that, because England and Wales have committal reform and the duty of direct engagement, there is an expectation, when cases come before the Crown Court, that the defence and prosecution have worked to narrow the issues between them. Really, what there should be is one hearing, pre-trial, and then they should move on to the trial hearing, and there are exceptional circumstances if you need to come back to the court between them. That is the ambition of us all here: to have fewer, more effective hearings. The hearings are, obviously, the most expensive part of the criminal justice system.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Is the figure of an average of six times accurate, Mr Herron?

Mr Herron: I have no reason to doubt the data on that. I do not think that it is inaccurate.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): What do you think the average would be in the mainland? I know that the Scottish judicial system is different from that in England. What would the average be in an English region?

Mr May: My understanding is that the average number of adjournments for all cases in the Crown Court here is nine.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Nine adjournments?

Mr May: It was 11, 10 years ago, but it has reduced to nine. Not every adjournment is a bad thing, because there is a case management process that is gone through by the judge, where they bring cases forward for mention, in order to understand the progress that has been made and the next steps that are needed.

The real challenge comes when you end up adjourning a case that would normally be ready to go to trial. Is it an effective trial or what is called a "cracked" or an ineffective trial? In that respect, again, we have made progress. We are currently at a situation where 58% of cases proceed to trial on the date that they are supposed to. Ten years ago, that figure was 43%. Therefore, there has been a substantial increase. We still have more to do to try to reduce the number of cracked and ineffective trials that, for whatever reason, collapse on the day or need to be rescheduled for a later date.

Adjournments are a challenge, for example, if the victim or the witness expects that something will happen on that day that will require them to hear or to give evidence, and it does not happen. That is clearly a much bigger problem than having an adjournment that is part of a planned process to bring the case forward.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): I accept that we are down from 11 to nine, as you say. However, an average of nine adjournments indicates to me that there is a culture of adjournment in Northern Ireland. Is that a fair comment?

Mr May: As I said, it is a part of the case management process. You will see a lot more adjournments in charge cases, because they enter the court system earlier. It is, of course, something that we would like to reduce. If you reduce the time that it takes to bring cases forward, you will reduce the number of adjournments. I am not defending nine as being a good number. I do not have a number for England and Wales to compare it against, I am afraid, Chair. I will see whether we have that.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): If you could do that, I would be grateful. To be fair, and I am not trying to be hypercritical, nine adjournments on average sounds to me like a culture of adjournment.

There seems to be a four-legged stool, and you are three legs of that stool. I accept absolutely that Her Majesty's judiciary is independent, but is there sufficient co-operation to ensure the delivery of a better service? That is hugely important, not least, given our history in Northern Ireland, in dealing with criminality. Is there more work that can be done, and is more work being done, to improve that? I accept that the Lord Chief Justice will guard the independence of the court — that is a given — but can you assure us that there is more work ongoing and that we will get a better system at the end of it?

Mr May: Yes, there is an awful lot going on to improve that system. The Lord Chief Justice is a member of the Criminal Justice Board and has brought forward a number of the ideas that we are talking about today for initiatives to improve the operation of the justice system. Stephen talked about the Crown Court liaison group and the Crown Court case performance groups, which, at a Northern Ireland level and a local level respectively, manage cases on a much more regular and bespoke basis. There are good grounds for us saying that we are making progress in the right way.

There is, of course, always a question for Ministers on whether to introduce a system of statutory case management. The 2015 Act enabled the introduction of such a system, but that has not been taken forward. It is notable in that connection that Sir John Gillen, in his report on serious sexual offending, felt that introducing statutory case management would be overly prescriptive and would not provide benefits. Essentially, we are trying to establish a case management framework that will enable progress to be made. It is not off the table; it is something that we can come back to.

Stephen talked about some of the other steps that are necessary to ensure case management and following the principles that he outlined from England and Wales. Do you want to add anything to that, Stephen?

Mr Herron: If we are talking about judicial engagement, there is certainly a high level of judicial awareness of the role that they have to play in ensuring that cases are progressed effectively. We had a legal aid dispute that ran from about May 2015 to February 2016, which was not exactly a template for how we would deal with a backlog of cases. From dealings with several judges, I know that they are acutely aware of the impact that it has on victims and witnesses and are trying to ensure that cases that involve the most vulnerable are given priority. Being a judge is not easy: they come in for a lot of criticism about their independence, which is sometimes seen as distance from the rest of us. I can certainly vouch for the fact that the Lord Chief Justice is a very committed participant in the Criminal Justice Board, and the judges that I have dealings with are equally committed to ensuring that they play an effective role in case management.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): The impact of a delay in justice obviously has a huge impact on the individual, but it also has a huge impact on public confidence. You do not need me to tell you that, given the ongoing issues that are at play. That is below 50%, which is a cause for concern for everyone in Northern Ireland. Therefore, as a deterrent for those who want to go out and perform acts of a criminal nature, whatever they might be, that is something that we all, as public servants in various roles here, need to see being addressed to give that confidence back to people. The Scottish Administration have imposed shortened time limits for cases. Is that something that we are looking at doing?

Mr May: I will start by talking a little bit about the COVID recovery piece that you mentioned, before I come on to your last question. I do not have the stat for the number of cases, but I found something that says that there are 330 more defendants awaiting trial in the Crown Court than there were a year ago in April 2020.

As Stephen said, we have already begun. As many Crown Courts are now operating as were operating pre-COVID, and there are plans to introduce two further courts by September 2021. We are working hard to try to deliver that so that we can make a dent on that backlog. We have, through the Criminal Justice Board, mounted a COVID-recovery bid, which is before the Executive today. I am sure that they have reached a conclusion, but I do not know what the answer is. We are hopeful that we will secure some additional funding to enable the extra work to be taken forward.

Our current estimate is that, if COVID does not get in the way, Magistrates' Court business will be recovered during this financial year. In other words, we will get back to a pre-COVID position by March 2022. We expect that the Crown Court will take longer. It could take up to two years for the Crown Court to be fully recovered. We are looking at ways in which we can improve that.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): OK.

Mr May: You mentioned time limits. Just very briefly: I know that, in England and Wales, they have actually had to increase the amount of time for cases, because, otherwise, they would not be heard. I have not heard that they have reduced the amount of time in Scotland, but they do have a system of statutory time limits. We have looked at having such a system here. It was initially planned for youth cases. However, in practice, because of the other work that is being done — earlier, Simon mentioned crime prevention — early intervention in youth cases means that we have far fewer youth cases now, so it would actually not make a big difference to introduce time limits for those cases.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): OK. Earlier, Chief Constable, there was mention of files being prepared for the PPS. I have spoken to many of your officers on the ground about their frustration with the fact that "Joe Criminal" is not being pursued through the courts and given a custodial sentence, or whatever. In the report, some of those files were described as being of poor quality or worse. Can we be sure and confident that the PSNI is providing effective training for officers to ensure that that statistic is addressed and that files go to the PPS that will actually ensure prosecutions?

Chief Constable Byrne: Yes. At the end of the day, there is always a bar to raise. Before I go on to talk about training, I will say that there are some competing statistics. You mentioned confidence, and the last figure that I got for that was 45% for the overall system. However, one to try to understand is that, in the same period, satisfaction with the system has actually gone up, whether you are a victim or a witness. There are various figures, but witness satisfaction is now at 80%. Victim satisfaction is 64%; it was 62%. Overall satisfaction has gone up from 65% in 2008 to 73% in 2020. Therefore, there are some interesting contradictions.

I touched on it in the introduction that, absolutely, the emphasis on training and quality has to be paramount. We talked before about it being a funnel and said that things go in the system and there are various bits where you can get error, be that with forensic submission timeliness or file quality. Obviously, we train at the point of recruitment. Last year, we trained 600 specialist officers in disclosure. There is an ongoing commitment to make sure that we are abreast of legislative change — for example, there is a lot of difference now to the rules around stalking and harassment — as well as procedural change. There is also the dialogue between PPS and us on specific cases. That also adds to the layer of quality assurance.

What we have seen, certainly, over the past couple of years and the Working Together programme, is far more emphasis on the front end and getting that right. We touched on those things before, such as guidance to officers about the minimum standard for a file, what should be in there, and what should not. As Stephen said earlier — it is a point that is worth repeating — just as a late file that has deficiencies is a problem, so, too, is overbuilding files, because you are just putting in wasted effort that still delays things. Therefore, there is a lot of dialogue and emphasis on supervisory checking and making sure that time limits are met. It is performance managed at district level. As I said earlier, we are introducing greater scrutiny across the whole organisation.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Mr Herron, do you see what the Chief Constable is talking about actually manifesting itself when cases are presented to you in the PPS?

Mr Herron: We do. There is a specific example that might be useful to illustrate that. We have a serious crime unit that deals with murder cases and serious sexual offending. From 2019, we introduced a gateway approach. That is our bespoke model. Sexual offences cases, in particular, are very slow to move through the Crown Court, and we and the police put considerable resources into making sure that, whenever a file comes to us, it is ready to be directed on. In investigations by police, we have seen great improvements in the number of cases that have everything that is required. Where it is not at that standard, there is liaison between our gateway team and a gateway team on the police side. Before a file is passed on to the prosecutor, the gateway team works closely with police to get that file ready for a decision to be made. That allows the prosecutor to work on other material. That will cut down on the back and forth in which, if we get a file that is not complete, we have to do what is called a decision information request to the police, which has a number of outstanding enquiries on it. We have seen big improvements in the quality of files that have come through that bespoke approach, and we are looking at how that can be scaled up to be replicated elsewhere.

Mr McHugh: Tá fáilte romhaibh uilig. You are all very welcome. Many of the questions that I was hoping to ask have been covered. Consistent with a comment that was made about adjournments, poor case management and poor case files, which seem to be very much historical problems, the Chair raised the issue of training being needed in that whole area. To what extent does that affect you achieving your objective of "get it right first time"?

Chief Constable Byrne: Was that for me?

Mr May: Do you want to take that, Simon?

Chief Constable Byrne: Andrew talked about his experience of "Well begun is half done". That is the Christopher Robin approach. I do not wish to sound flippant by saying that. Getting it right first time is hugely important, because that speeds things up. I touched on the matter of "get it right first time" before in relation to the Chair's question. Last year, in recognition of the fact that disclosure has been an issue that has had an effect here, in England and in Wales, 600 officers were trained in the most up-to-date disclosure techniques, 1,380 police officers were trained in the quality and file build stuff, and 120 were trained in investigative skills. Those things overlap.

It is important that we invest in training at the front end. That is one thing. The second is about effective supervision. The third, which I have touched on a few times, is about there being quality assurance and performance review, so that you can show that there are consistent standards across the country. That happens within the organisation and through the Working Together programme, which has different strands. Peter might want to touch on that. As members of the Criminal Justice Board, all three of us get that higher-level aggregate data, so we try to spot trends in court backlogs, front-end problems, or whatever it may be.

Mr May: As a board, we are supported by representatives of each of our agencies who constitute something called the speeding up justice group. That group meets regularly and has a focus on the ways in which we can address the sorts of problems that you have identified. It is not just about big new legislative initiatives. A lot of it is about how we can make operational improvements within and between organisations to try to improve the flow and the timeliness in which we proceed. I have set out at some length, including in my introductory remarks, the range of things that we are taking forward. At each stage, we will look to evaluate, to learn and to move on. It is not that we will ever get to the end of this; there will always be a need to do more to try to improve the way that the justice system works.

Mr McHugh: To what extent do you work with the PPS to ensure more efficient sharing of documentation and the likes of that to achieve successful outcomes?

Mr May: I am not sure whether that is aimed at me, but I will start. Through the Criminal Justice Board, we have established a digital strategy that sets out the high-level priorities for the justice system and how we will advance our digital approach. Our backbone for that, as Simon mentioned earlier, is the Causeway system. That is an end-to-end case management system, which begins at the time that the crime is recorded and goes right through to the point at which there is a disposal at the court case. When it was introduced 10 years ago, that case management system was pretty much a world first as far as capability was concerned, but it was not easy to get the management information out. It was fine to follow where the case was, but you could not disaggregate the data. A recent upgrade, completed in 2019, means that we can now begin to source that management information, which is absolutely driving our understanding of where we need to improve and where the particular backlogs and difficulties exist. That is helping us to focus our efforts on where we can have the biggest impact.

Mr McHugh: Figures on the comparison with what happens in Britain were quoted on a couple of occasions. I think that you had a 20% charge rate. How do you compare with Britain on successful prosecutions?

Mr May: I do not have the comparator to England, but I know that, as Simon said, for Crown Court cases, we had a conviction rate of 86% in 2019. That is the last year for which I have figures for that. That is a pretty robust figure. If it was very much higher than that, questions would begin to be raised about whether there was fairness in the justice system. There is always a balance to be found, but that figure of 86% is really robust. I do not know what that would be in England.

Mr Herron: I do not have the figures for England and Wales, but they are in the 80 percentile, so we are slightly better. They may be at 82% or 83%; we are at 84%, 85% or 86%. It will vary from year to year. It is about 80% in the Magistrates' Court. Those rates are pretty high in both jurisdictions. We maybe have a slightly higher rate. I am not sure that you can draw too much from that, but that is the comparison figure.

Mr McHugh: OK. Thank you.

Chief Constable Byrne: May I come in?

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Yes.

Chief Constable Byrne: Naturally, you do not want to compare apples and pears, but it is probably important to do some comparison. I have some figures that give some context to the last part of your answer, Peter. The overall detection rate for crime in Northern Ireland was 26·9% at the end of 2019-2020. The comparative figure for England and Wells was 10·8%. That is reflected in the charge rate. We had a 20% charge rate out of that 26%, if you are with me, compared with 7% in England and Wales. Therefore, whilst there are some subtle differences and there is always more to do, in credit to people, that is quite impressive work.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): OK.

Mr McHugh: When looking at that 20% charge rate, it is equally important to know how successful the outcomes have been with them being charged and found guilty.

Chief Constable Byrne: Yes. That was the conviction rate. You look at the attrition at different points of the journey. As Peter said, that is about how you mine the data.

Mr Boylan: Chair, I tried to get in earlier. I declare an interest as I recently had a case that went to court. I want to recognise the efficiency of the PSNI and the PPS in dealing with that case. I want to put that on the record.

Chair, I want to go back to your point about the culture of adjournments. My questions are probably to Peter and Simon. Witnesses, victims and the PSNI all have to turn up to give evidence and go into the witness box. Peter, what does that say to the victims and witnesses about public confidence and how they should deal with that? It can be a difficult situation for them.

Simon, what are your views on the time that the PSNI has to spend appearing in court and how that impacts on the service in general?

Mr May: I tried to draw out the distinction between adjournments per se and, in particular, those occasions when victims and witnesses will be expecting a trial to commence. Stephen might want to say something about the victim and witness care unit that the PPS runs, which is the key way of communicating with victims and witnesses as we go through that process.

We are taking a number of steps to try to reduce the number of adjournments. I mentioned the indictable cases approach.

The evaluation of that found that there were 15% fewer adjournments in those cases than in 2014-15. We also believe that committal reform should help to reduce the number of adjournments. The introduction of the case progression officers that we talked about earlier is also designed to help more issues to be addressed away from the courtroom so as not to require a formal adjournment but still to enable the case to be managed proactively without bringing everybody into the courtroom at once.

Those are some of the things that we are doing to try to reduce the number of adjournments. Stephen, do you want to say something about the interface with victims and witnesses? We recognise that it is a challenge and causes problems when people have expectations that are not met.

Mr Herron: Certainly, Peter. Just to follow on from that, obviously, we are all conscious that there are victims and witnesses in those cases, as well as a defendant. It is a very anxious time waiting for cases to come to court. When something does not proceed on the date that it is meant to proceed, it unnecessarily increases anxiety levels. We all want to address that.

Other measures are coming out of the disruption that was caused by the pandemic that will improve things in the future. We found that, when a case needs to be mentioned, that does not have to be done in court every time. We will look at more things being done by administrative mentions, for example, which can, perhaps, be done remotely so that people do not need to be physically in courtrooms. We are trying to do some of that offline. That was done out of necessity during the pandemic and matters such as court adjournments and mentions were done without the parties being physically present in court buildings. Part of that is about using remote evidence centres for the police, which, I think, Peter and Simon have talked about. We are also piloting those for vulnerable witnesses who would benefit from not being in the courtroom at all and would get better support from the likes of Victim Support by giving their evidence from a remote location.

Those things are about trying to address, if you like, the quality of the experience of giving evidence, but there is no doubt that we all need to do more to reduce the number of hearings. Although committal reform will provide us with a route into the Crown Court much more quickly, there is a lot of work to be done, and the structures are already in place to ensure that files are case-ready as much as they can be. In England and Wales, files are not completely case-ready when they go to the Crown Court. There is a proportionate file build and the evidence is served in phases. The prosecution will outline its case, but it will not have built a case like we have by the time it comes to the Crown Court. That is where the big cultural change will come in, with the prosecution and defence having to engage and judges having to manage that process. That will be a very big shift, but it has resulted in fewer mentions and adjournments in the Crown Court in England and Wales. That is where we are going to get to eventually when the committal reform process is embedded.

Chief Constable Byrne: Will I add something?

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Yes, please.

Chief Constable Byrne: I think that the question about some police detail as well, was it not?

Chief Constable Byrne: There are a few bits. There is the time dimension, but there are also quite interesting roles that we have not had a chance to talk about, which are the contest liaison officers. I will come on to what they do.

Last year, we were required to attend court to give evidence 32,500 times. That is a significant demand. Aggregating that over the year, we estimate that cost to be the equivalent of 111 police officers. Just like a victim of crime — sometimes police officers are victims — that is quite a significant commitment, so adjournments or timeliness affects us as an organisation just as much as other things.

In fairness, to try to mitigate that, we have those contest liaison officers. Those roles are quite interesting because they are the central point of contact between the PPS victim and witness units, solicitors, the judiciary, Victim Support etc. They work with the Court Service to prepare court lists, with victims and witnesses if there is a change of plea and will accompany victims and witnesses to court if the case runs and remain with them while the case is running. They also chase up victims or witnesses who have not attended court. Peter spoke earlier about cracked and effective trials. We do not want what would be ineffective trials because witnesses are not there. There is a series of mitigations. They will also liaise with police witnesses themselves to make sure that they attend. Those roles are quite interesting.

Our assessment is that those officers have significantly reduced the need for, for example, investigating officers to come to court, over and above police or other witnesses, just to support the PPS or the judiciary. There are some impacts, but there are also some things that we are trying to do to work with other people in the system to mitigate them.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Mr Boylan, if you will just permit me to — .

Mr Boylan: OK, Chair. On the administrative support work for the Crown Court judges — this is for Peter probably — can you expand a bit on why that is still available, and what is being done to address the issue?

Mr May: I am afraid that I did not completely catch that. The IT was not perfect.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): You broke up a bit. Can I ask you to repeat that?

Mr Boylan: Sorry. It was about the administrative support for Crown Court judges.

Mr May: Case progression officers have been put in place to help to support judges in Crown Court areas to interface with the PPS and the defence about case readiness and to help to advance cases to the best extent possible. That allows judges to spend more time on the core judicial elements and takes some of the administrative burden away from them. That was one of the Audit Office's recommendations in its 2018 report. At the moment, we have six officers. We started with two, but the trial showed that they were effective, so we increased it to six. If I am right, Stephen, there are two attached to the PPS.

Mr Herron: Yes. When a judge has given a direction and ordered parties to have progressed a case by the next time it is in court, the case progression officers in the background will contact the prosecution and defence to ensure that progress is being made and chase up any items. They provide effective assistance to a judge by making sure that there is progress and that the judge does not have to replicate some of the work that they may have to do if all of it were done in the court environment.

Mr Boylan: Thank you very much for attending.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Before I bring in Mr Harvey, I am conscious, Mr Luney, that we have not heard from you about the Courts Service. There have been lots of conversations, questions and answers here, but I am interested to hear about the Courts Service from your perspective, if you do not mind.

Mr Peter Luney (Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunals Service): Chair, our role is to support the judiciary in the management of cases. You have probably heard quite a bit about what we have been doing through the use of case progression officers and our COVID recovery response. Hopefully, some of the figures speak for themselves. We also work very closely with the judiciary on the procedural aspects. One of the issues that came up in the context of the report was the case management protocol, and that was discussed earlier in the meeting in the context of statutory case management.

Along with the presiding judge for the Crown Court liaison committee, we worked to refresh the case management protocol, and it was published again in November 2019. As part of that, a huge amount of work was done on judicial training and engagement with the legal profession through the use of continuing professional development (CPD) events. It was all about trying to give new impetus to case management in order to try to make the systems more effective. The new practice direction also included more detailed material on protocols for victims and witnesses and vulnerable victims and defendants. There has been a real focus on trying to improve efficiency across the courts. Although COVID has clearly had an impact on our outstanding caseloads, again, we are working every closely with the judiciary and partners, who are in the room with you, to try to recover that as quickly as possible.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): From the Northern Ireland Courts and Tribunals Service's perspective, do you have enough resource to help to improve the situation at the moment?

Mr Luney: We work very closely with the Department and with the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) HR to ensure that our vacancies are filled as quickly as possible. Certainly, the recovery work has created pressures for us. We are, however, making use of additional resource through agency staff and bringing in additional staff from the available supply lists to manage that. I believe that we are managing that effectively. At court clerk grade, for example, which is quite specialist and is an EO1 grade, there were some delays in getting supply, but that was not peculiar to the Courts Service; rather, it was a general issue. I am positive about the resource position and the support that we have had from the Department.

Mr May: I mentioned earlier, Chair, that we have made a bid to the centre for some money to help recovery. That will be to help to employ additional court clerks, for example. There is then the question of getting the people with the right skills in. It is likely to take a few months for us to get those people in, but we are working hard to try to achieve that.

Mr Harvey: Mr May, Mr Byrne and Mr Herron, it is good to see you. The PPS relies on internal staff, including panels of barristers. Is it five barristers to a panel? Do you have enough and are these panels always readily available, or could demand be better met with an increased number of panels? Could this also resolve adjournment issues?

Mr Herron: There are a couple of aspects to that question. It is not five counsel to a panel. We have a pool of counsel that we will use in the Magistrates' Court who do some of the advocacy, arguing cases in court for us. In Crown Court cases, we have a panel list of about 25, split among various Crown Court offices. We do not have a shortage of counsel. One of the things that counsel do not do is to take decisions on files, so that is where prosecutors are distinct from the counsel whom we use. Counsel can advise us on cases. We use senior counsel then, whom we draw off a list. They, perhaps, give us advice about whether the test for prosecution is met and then argue that. If it is a very serious case, senior counsel will be involved. I do not think that we have any issue with the number of counsel available.

What we probably do have some difficulties with is our funding situation, because we are always in the region of £1·5 million to £2 million short. When we make bids in-year, they are usually met, I have to say, by the Department of Finance. We are running with around 61 agency staff at the minute. Most of those are administrative grade. In a similar position to Peter, we are looking to increase those to help us through COVID recovery planning. If we get only one-year budget settlements, it does not allow us to tackle our planning and resourcing in a sustained way. I would like to think that, if we can get back to a cycle of five-year budget planning and have certainty about that, we can address our resourcing issues regarding staff.

Mr Harvey: On crime to conviction, you said that you have a charge rate of one in five. That is fairly good, but it is the timings. It takes 50% more time to get to that stage than in England. You said that it is more complex here, but do you think that you can improve on that?

Chief Constable Byrne: Yes. The general nature of how crime has changed across the UK is broadly similar. We have seen a fall in what we describe as "acquisitive" crime — burglary, theft and so on — and an increase in violence, sexual crime, domestic abuse and things like that. You might have the figures in front of you. Is the first one 10 days and it goes to 93 days? The difference between us and England and Wales is that we authorise our own charging here, which is different to the system in England and Wales. There are occasions in England and Wales when the police, in urgency, can charge, but would we do that here? I think that the key thing to look at is making sure that we have case-ready files to go to Stephen and his colleagues. It is building a file beforehand that takes the time.

When we look at the figures, we recognise that one of the things that we want to consider is that there are broadly two routes to get into the system. There are the people whom you charge. It might be a serious case, and they are charged and go to court the next day, or it might be a serious case, and they are charged and bailed to court within a short time. The issue that needs more scrutiny are cases in which people are arrested and then released under report. That is slightly different to being on bail. There are 5,000-plus each year in the charge route, but I think that it is 13,000 in the report route. Stephen and I recognise that we want to put more effort into scrutinising the investigation in that space. There is a difference in some of the timeliness, so, in the year ahead, we either have to work out how we get more into the charge pot or more scrutiny of those in the reporting pot. In my experience, there is a difference between here and England and Wales, although I do not have the precise figures in front of me. We should look at that lever this year.

Mr Harvey: OK. You mentioned that there was an increase in the numbers of one particular crime of 325%. Was that an actual increase in crime, or was your detection better? Were you doing your job better?

Chief Constable Byrne: That is always one of the conundrums, is it not? In certain types of crime, which you would maybe call "hidden" crime — domestic abuse and certain types of sexual crime — there is always a narrative across policing, not just here, when crime goes up that people will say it is because there is more incompetence. Equally, when crime goes down, it is because we are being more effective. There is a whole separate criminological debate about whether that is entirely accurate. As the Chair said, you cannot ignore the correlation that, if people think that there is justice, with all the caveats of fair justice, it will give them more confidence to step forward.

I was looking for the crime figures that you quoted. From recollection, the huge percentage increases were for crimes with an online footprint. I think that the one that I quoted was when we were saying that, for example, violence against a person between 2010 and 2019 had gone up 40% — that is the actual crime — but, in a similar period, the amount of crime of the same category that had an online tag increased by 600% or 300%. For example, for sexual offences, the online presence was 325%, but the actual increase, while still big, was 84·6%.

That is just a reflection of how we use digital evidence either to put someone at a scene or, for example, through texts, photographs etc prove, or, indeed, as Stephen said, disprove certain assertions in those relationship-type crimes.

Mr Harvey: I understand. You mentioned fixed penalties, about which you have been talking to the Infrastructure Minister, and said that you were thinking about using fixed penalties for a larger group of offences. What are your next steps? When do you think that you could progress that?

Chief Constable Byrne: I will need to check the conventions of the group about what I am supposed to say about a meeting the Minister. I do not want to cause another crisis. [Laughter.]

It was a very productive meeting yesterday. There was a commitment by the Minister and her officials to see whether, within the time left in this Assembly, we could look at some enabling legislation to help that to happen. The big one that we see is careless driving. There are other kindred offences, but they are not of the same volume. There was a consensus that, if we could make that change from a summons to a fixed penalty notice, it would be better for everybody.

Mr Harvey: Definitely. Thank you very much.

Mr O'Toole: Thank you all for coming. Most of the key issues have been covered.

You are all members of the Criminal Justice Board. What are the metrics that you are testing yourselves against on speeding up justice?

Mr May: We have quite a detailed performance dashboard that we look at monthly or quarterly depending on the frequency of our meetings. We have been meeting monthly over the past 18 months or so. As Stephen said, that breaks each case down into five separate areas or stages of case progression. It also allows us to look at it by court area and so on.

The speeding up justice group tries to identify the issues that are of most importance and draws those to our attention. We can then look at whether the steps that we are already taking are likely to produce positive change or whether new actions are needed. I would have no problem if the Committee wished to see a copy of the kind of dashboard that we look at regularly and share that with you. It is slightly hard to explain a row of figures.

There are , of course, some high-level targets in the Programme for Government (PFG) on increasing the timeliness of cases. The benchmark figure that we have been aiming for from 2016 is 139 days. As I said, immediately prior to COVID, we had got the figures down to 149 days, so we still had progress to make but were going in the right direction and had five quarters of continuous improvement at a collective level. The biggest issue that we face is Crown Court summons cases. That is where a lot of our work is focused. A research project is well under way that will hopefully produce some evidence that will help us to understand better and really get underneath the detail. You will understand how complex some of these issues are. It will take us to understand the detail and to get to the right pieces of information that will help us to make the difference. This is an area in which it is all too easy to make a change and believe that it will produce a positive outcome, only to find that it has not done quite what we all hoped it would do at the end. We spend a lot of our time on that. I do not know whether colleagues want to add anything.

Mr Herron: We have a lot of data on the performance metrics. That has taken a lot of work, and I have to give credit to the Department of Justice and the speeding up justice team for trying to extract data. The purpose of the case management system was to track live cases. It was not meant to be used for performance measurement.

As well as the overall number of days taken to dispose of cases, in the future, we need to look at the number of cracked and ineffective trials and whether we can do more to keep ourselves on the right track in reducing those. We may also need to look at the number of adjournments. We have talked at quite some length about the impact that adjournments can have. As a board, we will look at whether we should have fewer and more effective hearings when committal reform is brought in.

Mr O'Toole: There is a performance dashboard that includes high-level targets in the PFG that you look at at your monthly board meetings and that we can see.

Mr Herron: Yes. A good example of its use was with the recovery in the Magistrates’ Court. That was because of what it was able to tell us in a way that we had not been able to find before with real live-time data. When we put additional resources into the Magistrates’ Court between September 2020 and January 2021, we were operating at about 120% capacity. That was very effective in getting through the work in the Magistrates’ Court. Obviously, it is a lot more complex to tackle delay in the Crown Court. It is a much more involved process in trying to deal with Crown Court cases than it is with cases that are in a summary jurisdiction and where the issues are not as complex.

Primarily through the use of overtime and additional courts without additional staff, we found that we were able to operate at 120% capacity for a short period. That had a significant impact. Work by the Criminal Justice Board and the speeding up justice team gave us that data. That showed us the impact that putting additional resources into that area had had.

Mr May: The Courts Service produced data that was able to demonstrate the number of new cases coming into the system and being resolved each month. Through that, we were able to see that we were making a substantial dent in the backlog that had built up in the Magistrates’ Court. We still have more to do in the Crown Court. As I said, it will take us longer to recover the Crown Court.

Mr O'Toole: OK. Chair, it would be helpful if the witnesses could provide us with the dashboard and a summary of the view on the most important metrics against which they are testing themselves.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): OK. I do not think that there would be any difficulty with that.

Mr O'Toole: I do not have anything else. Thank you.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Mr Luney, before we move on, I want to ask you about what we have established as the average of nine adjournments in cases across the Crown Courts. What practical implications does that have for you and your workforce?

Mr Luney: Obviously, the more adjournments, the more court time is taken up. Through the case progression officer pilot and the work that is being done in general to improve the management of cases, if we can drive down the number of adjournments in a typical case, we could free up court and staff time and ensure that resources are used for the stages of the cases that are most meaningful, rather than having cases listed for relatively short adjournments.

Mr Beggs: Thanks for your contributions so far.

I want to go back to adjournments, delays and, I dare say, the associated cost. I am mindful of the comment that justice delayed is justice denied.

The Audit Office report indicates that the Department of Justice's costs per head of population are 82% higher than those of the Department in England and Wales, the cost of policing is 161% higher per head of population than in England and Wales, the cost of prosecution is 70% higher in Northern Ireland, and the cost of courts is 50% higher per head of population. Yet, the outcomes for all of that extra money are, I have to say, shockingly disappointing, with an average of 515 days from crime to completion and some 12% of cases taking more than 1,000 days, which is almost three years. As others have said, in Crown Court cases, victims, defendants and witnesses experienced an average of six and a half adjournments. My question to each of you is this: what has gone wrong, and why is it taking so long to fix it? I understand that this has been worked on for decades.

Mr May: Thanks for the question. First, you cannot measure the effectiveness of a justice system purely by time taken. The quality dimension is really important, and the information that we have provided around the number of people convicted and the proportion of recorded crimes that lead to charges and to convictions are very relevant and should not be overlooked. Looking at all cases and comparing average case processing times in England and Wales with those in Northern Ireland, the reality is that, as of 2019, we were progressing all cases more quickly. In 2019, our average time was 149 days, and it was 164 days in England and Wales. In the 10 years previous —.

Mr Beggs: My question is not just on the time that it takes to progress a case but on the time from the crime until the completion of the case. You can pick out elements that might produce nice numbers, but, for the victim, it is the time from the crime until the completion of the case that is important.

Mr May: I think that there is a small difference in the way in which case times are measured here, but those averages are for that time: from beginning to end; not one part of the process. That is to reassure you.

Over 10 years, we have seen an overall 8% reduction in average case progression time for all cases. England and Wales have seen an increase of 23%. That is not to hide the problem that we have, which is, essentially, with Crown Court cases and, particularly, Crown Court summons cases, which skew the figures.

You mentioned specific cases that might take over 1,000 days. I will ask Stephen to say a little more about that, but we need to recognise the variety of reasons why a case might take a long time, one of which is that there could be satellite litigation. In other words, people could be litigating on a matter that means that the case needs to be held pending the resolution of another case. Equally, as colleagues explained, particularly with the increase in sexual and violent offending, the challenge and complexity around the progression of the case, including, for example, the readiness of the victim to give evidence and so on, can make a difference. I absolutely accept that the number of cases taking more than 1,000 days is unacceptable and that we need to do something to reduce that, but I guard against the view that no case should take 1,000 days, because I do not believe that that is achievable or that it would be the sign of a good justice system. Stephen, do you want to add to that?

Mr Herron: Yes, I will. The Audit Office report was in 2018. Speaking from a prosecutor perspective, in 2019, in recognition of an additional pledge from the Government to fund 20,000 police officers in England and Wales, the CPS was given additional yearly funding of £85 million to recruit additional prosecutors. It was not to match fund the increase in police with a resulting increase in prosecutors; it was in recognition of the same crime trends as Simon mentioned earlier: more complex crime had increased in England and Wales. The volume of cases being dealt with by the justice system has reduced but their complexity has increased.

Simon talked about 4,777 mobile phones having to be looked at by the unit. One GB of data equates to about 20,000 pages. An iPhone 12 — I am sure that the police have seized many of that type of phone — has a storage capacity of about 256 GB, which is about 50 million pages. Part of the funding for the CPS was in recognition of the huge complexity and changing nature of crime. Dealing with encrypted devices and all those types of things takes a lot of time, and those are the cases that will come out at the 1,000-day end of the spectrum. Many sexual offence cases and drugs cases involve relevant material on digital devices, and that material takes a long time to deal with.

Rather than just putting in resources, you also have to try to focus on reasonable lines of enquiry. As I have said before, part of the problem in this jurisdiction is the culture of overbuilding cases. The police and PPS are not doing that deliberately because we have higher standards; it is because we cannot anticipate where the defence will challenge a case, which causes the use of unnecessary resources. A duty of engagement with the defence is needed at an earlier stage to narrow the issues and therefore require less forensic analysis by the police and those who assist them with that. That will be part of the solution.

Chief Constable Byrne: I will clarify that: ultimately, there are questions to be asked about the input of cost and the outputs of court cases and justice. The context is important. Stephen talked about uplifts in budgets in England and Wales, and your challenge to us is, "Are you doing enough with what you've got?". I remind members that, as stated in another Audit Office report, the PSNI suffered the single biggest cut to its resources during the period of austerity. Of course, that is still a matter for New Decade, New Approach (NDNA). In real terms, the system has seen an 18% cut in its resources over the period covered in the report. From a policing point of view, although the amount went up from £704 million in 2016-17 to £745 million last year, taking account of inflation, that is standing still. Like-for-like comparisons are sometimes difficult because hidden in our budget is the bounce effect of the unique circumstances of the terrorist and security threat. The complexity of the terrorism investigation side accounts for a big proportion of the number of cases that take 1,000 days, and, compared with other places, we have to set aside more resource to deal with public order and the issues that go with it. Sometimes, the proportion of front-line activity will differ between the PSNI and the police services in England and Wales. I am conscious — we probably all are — of the value-for-money question, but there are reasons why resources go to other things.

Mr Beggs: I hope that you all acknowledge that each of your organisations receives higher funding than their equivalents in England and Wales, yet the collective output of your all working together in the justice system is producing poor outcomes.

My question for the Courts Service is this: why are two thirds of witnesses who are called not required to give evidence? Is that purely down to all of the adjournments? Are witnesses called but, because items are missing, not asked to give evidence?

Mr Luney: The reasons for a contest not going ahead when witnesses are there can vary. It could be that the date is ineffective, and therefore the case needs to be adjourned for a further contest to be set. There are various causes for that, such as the absence of material or the fact that some of the issues that were to be dealt with have not been resolved. Equally, an awful lot of cases can be resolved on the day itself, which is where the cracked dates come from. In such cases, although the witness has come to court, they are not required to give evidence because the case has resolved by way of a guilty plea or, in some cases, because some of the charges have been withdrawn. Different factors are at play.

Mr Beggs: Do you accept that it is strange that a relatively low proportion of guilty pleas comes in at the first hearing and that it may take four, five or six hearings before the defendant pleads guilty? Is that not an indication of a failing in the process?

Mr Luney: There is probably a culture issue there. Quite often, particularly at the lower level of courts, discussions between the defence and their clients and between the defence and the prosecution will take place in the court on the day that a matter is listed. Culture, as you will appreciate, is not an easy thing to change. Hopefully, through the modernisation programme that is being taken forward across the justice system, the Courts Service in particular, will provide the ability to manage cases digitally and to have the parties talking and exchanging digitally, which will allow that culture to change. There should not be the same need for barristers on the defence side to talk to the prosecution at the last minute. All of that should be sorted out at a much earlier stage.

Mr Beggs: One of the points in the report is that additional resources to manage the court system should ensure that all necessary processes are completed, that all critical evidence is available and that there is an accurate record of why a case is adjourned. Is that happening?

Mr Luney: That touches on two different issues. The case progression officer pilot has been touched on, and that is still subject to a formal evaluation, which the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency (NISRA) will take forward this year. It was to be evaluated last year, but COVID meant that it was pushed back. On the basis of the anecdotal results of the pilot, the Department has agreed to fund the roll-out of case progression officers to all areas.

Regarding the data for cracked and ineffective trials, which is the second part of the issue that was touched upon, we stopped collecting that as a formal national statistic but still routinely collect it as management information. Therefore, that information is still available, and Peter touched on some of the findings that we have seen through the reduction in cracked and ineffective trials.

There is an issue that we will work closely with the judiciary to resolve. Largely, we collect that information administratively at the minute. Where a case does not proceed, the court clerk in the courtroom makes an assessment or determination of the dominant cause of the adjournment. However, the cause is not always immediately apparent, which is one of the reasons why we stopped publishing the figures as national statistics. In England and Wales, when a case is adjourned like that, the judge, the prosecutor and the defence all stop and agree between them what the cause of the delay was, which is then recorded. That is probably where we want to get to.

Mr Beggs: Is that not a fairly basic scheme of managing the courts? I am surprised that you are saying that that is where you "want to get to".

Mr Luney: An extra layer of assurance on the figures can be added. Nothing is substantially out of kilter with the management information that we are collecting. However, doing it exactly how it is done in England and Wales, which is a Criminal Justice Inspection Northern Ireland (CJINI) recommendation, would probably give us that layer of additional assurance, which is important.

Mr Beggs: Do you accept that, aside from the court cost of adjournment, there is a huge cost for witnesses and victims? They may take time off work or be unable to carry out their normal duties. They may have sleepless nights before the case is due in court, only to find it repeatedly adjourned, which means that they have gone through the incident and the trauma a number of times. Do you accept that the justice system, collectively, is causing unnecessary stress for victims and witnesses because it is not being run efficiently?

Mr May: I will try to answer the member's question. Not every adjournment will have a victim or a witness present. As we keep coming back to, the issue is the point at which the victim or witness was expecting a case to progress. The most recent victim and witness survey conducted by the Department recorded a significant fall in the number of witnesses who reported that they had to attend court on more than one occasion. It fell from 35% in 2016-17 to 19% in 2019-2020. We absolutely need to go after and try to reduce that 19%. I did not want you or anyone else to have the sense that, because there were nine adjournments, the witness was present nine times. That is not normally be the case. In fact, it is the situation only in extraordinary cases. I wanted to clarify that point in case there was a misunderstanding.

Mr Beggs: Thank you for that. Has there been any attempt by the Department or the Courts Service to put a figure on the cost per hour of court time, bearing in mind all the overheads, so that there is a focus on the efficient use of that time?

Mr May: The report references activity-based costings. I am not, however, convinced that that is a sensible path to go down, because, essentially, an activity-based costings system requires time recording by all of the justice agencies. It is one thing to do that if you are an accountancy firm wanting to charge out and bill your clients; it is another thing to put a very administratively burdensome regime into a public-sector environment. What we are looking at instead, through our research project, is whether we can offer some costings on delay in the justice system. Given the nature of research projects, especially ones that are quite challenging, which, I suspect, this one will be, it is quite hard to know how successful they will be, but we will try to see whether we can identify better what the cost of delay is. When we say "delay", we mean "delay that needs to be avoided", rather than the time that it will inevitably take for cases to go through the system. That is the way in which we are looking to progress that. It is a way of trying to see whether we can find a sensible way of understanding the financial impact without creating a very burdensome system.

Mr Beggs: I fully appreciate the benefit of not having an overly bureaucratic system. Is there even an estimate of the number of hours in the courts each year and the total cost of the Courts Service? Knowing roughly what it costs for each hour in court would focus everybody's mind on using courtroom time wisely to achieve justice and value for money. Can you produce a figure for the number of hours in the criminal courts each year and the cost of running those courts?

Mr May: That data is not readily available at the moment. I am not even confident that the research project that I described will provide that information and evidence. Stephen mentioned our desire to see more business transacted virtually outside the courtroom and less in a formal courtroom, and that will make it much more difficult to create costings that are absolutely clear and transparent. Of course, we can make some high-level estimates of what the cost of running a trial for an hour would be and so on, but we would need to understand what the purpose of gathering the information is and how we would use that information to help to advance the common cause that we all have, which is to reduce the time taken.

Mr Beggs: Do you have a figure for the number of hours in the courts each year? If so, we could then look at the funding that goes to the Courts Service each year to get a very high-level estimate. Can you provide that to us?

Mr May: I do not believe that we hold that information, but I will ask Peter Luney, who is on the call, whether he believes that that information exists.

Mr Luney: It is not readily available. Previously, when we, along with Criminal Justice Inspection, looked at the court estate, it came up with a very rudimentary cost model per venue, which looked at the number of sitting days, rather than sitting hours, and the number of cases dealt with. That gives a very basic comparison. You will see a big variation between different venues, just because of the nature of buildings and the fact that some are modern and more efficient; some are old and underutilised. Therefore, it has been done previously in a very basic way, Mr Beggs, but that information is not readily available.

Mr Beggs: I would appreciate a copy of the previous rough estimates. That would be useful for everyone to focus on. I will turn to

—.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Mr Beggs, I have to advise you that your screen has frozen. I do not know whether you can hear me. Certainly, we cannot hear you. We will try to re-establish a link.

Chief Constable, you talked about the number of officers. I am mindful that there was an NDNA commitment to more police officers. That is why the full implementation of NDNA is important, frankly. Most crime happens at the weekend, does it not?

Stephen, have you considered a peer review of the efficiency of the PPS compared with prosecution services in other jurisdictions in the UK?

Mr Herron: It is difficult to do a like-for-like comparison. Scotland's is so different that it does not bear comparison. When we looked at England and Wales, we found that a lot more can be done remotely. CPS has a system called CPS Direct, which provides advice to police by telephone. Through Working Together, we have seen the benefits of closer working between the police and PPS. Certainly, on occasions when out-of-hours advice is required, while we found that it is quite an exceptional need, we can meet it. I do not think that there would be any benefit in a routine weekend service, or anything like that. I do not think that it would provide any benefit.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Further to the line of questioning that Mr Beggs was pursuing, have we now reached a situation where we have fixed costs for Crown Court cases?

Mr May: Would you like to say a little bit more, Chair, so that I am sure that I understand the question that I am trying to answer?

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): What I am saying is that many Crown Court cases will be repetitive and similar. Are we in a situation where many of those cases could have a fixed cost? Is there an open-ended situation whereby we could have nine or more adjournments, because nine is the average, and, each time, the cost mounts?

Mr May: Most adjournments will take — Stephen will keep me right — a minute or two in a court, although some will take longer.

Mr Herron: Yes. Also, in some adjournments, business is done. An application could be heard. It is not necessarily true that, when a matter is adjourned, no progress has been made in the case. Sometimes, an application, special measures or hearsay could be done at the time that the adjournment is made. Therefore, it is not as though there is no value in adjournments or that they are all unnecessary.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): OK. According to my screen, it looks as though Mr Beggs has dropped out. Has any other member got a question? There may be other questions that Mr Beggs wanted to ask.

Mr May: If he would like to write to us, we would be happy to respond in writing, if that is OK, Chair.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): Thank you all very much for your time. It has been very useful. We wish you well in your efforts to make the system much more efficient and, of course, make Northern Ireland a better and safer place. Thank you.

Mr May: Thank you for your time today.

The Chairperson (Mr Humphrey): I also thank Mr Stevenson and Mr Luney, who joined us remotely, for their attendance. Thank you very much, gentlemen.