Chamber and committees

In the last 5 years, almost 100,000 charges have been reported to the Aberdeen Office of COPFS.

COPFS uses a live, operational database to manage the processing of reports submitted to Procurators Fiscal by the police and other reporting agencies throughout Scotland. It is designed to meet business needs in the processing of criminal cases, rather than for statistical analysis. Any data sought in the requested period would encompass convictions for cases reported out with that period. As such, any figures would not accurately reflect numbers of convictions in respect of the cases reported in that period.

This is an operational matter for Police Scotland.

As SEPA are directly responsible for its day-to-day operations, I have asked Nicole Paterson, Chief Executive of SEPA to respond. Her response is as follows:

SEPA plan the work it will deliver each year and regularly monitor, review and report on performance in a variety of formats.

The automated customer hub enables greater data insights for regular and accurate performance reporting. KPIs include first call resolution, average handling time, call abandoned, time spent customer facing as percentage of rota, forecast and adherence time and customer satisfaction.

I refer the member to the answer to question S6W-32136 on 18 December 2024. All answers to written Parliamentary Questions are available on the Parliament's website, the search facility for which can be found athttps://www.parliament.scot/chamber-and-committees/written-questions-and-answers.

SEPA has robust resilience and emergency management processes in place with partners.

There is no change for stakeholders as they continue to use the unchanged Priority Partner number (emergency services). Previously callers would have used a specific number and spoke to a person in the Customer Hub and that process has not changed.

The following table shows the number of criminal cases reported to COPFS with a first substantive marking for court proceedings.

This is an operational matter for Police Scotland.

As SEPA are directly responsible for its day-to-day operations, I have asked Nicole Paterson, Chief Executive of SEPA to respond. Her response is as follows:

As part of the early implementation of the enhanced out-of-hours service, SEPA successfully managed 182 calls that were received outside of working hours during the first four weeks of operation. This included 24 emergency service calls and 158 general inquiries, with a total of 21 calls requiring escalation, all of which were resolved promptly.

SEPA will continue to monitor call performance and customer experience through continuous engagement and involvement of the customer hub team and colleagues across the service, and through customer feedback surveys. A customer experience manager with significant experience of managing contact centres has been appointed to ensure the effective planning and performance management of SEPA’s customer service.

There is no change to how the public contact SEPA’s 24-7 service. The public are still able to use the same telephone number or online contact form to report incidents.

SEPA’s external website provides clear information on how to contact SEPA and report an incident Contact us | Beta | SEPA | Scottish Environment Protection Agency.

The Scottish Government have previously published in an FOI response that £519,842.13 inc VAT was spent on investigating the creation of a Scottish public energy company. This information is available in detail at Public money spent on state run energy company: FOI release - gov.scot.