Scotland’s Court Delays Outrun Extra Rooms and Vendor Pitches

Scotland’s High Court waits are still climbing after the Covid trial backlog fell. Extra courtrooms will not bring them down, the courts service now says.

Aaseya and Pegasystems will take a connected digital justice pitch to Glasgow on 22 October, into a system whose own chief has already told MSPs that adding rooms treats the wrong problem.

Extra Trial Courts Will Not Bring Waits Down

The Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service recovered the national trial queue that ballooned in the pandemic, then watched solemn business keep rising underneath that headline. Scheduled trials had fallen to 12,992 by the end of July 2026, from a peak of 43,606 in January 2022. High Court scheduled trials still sit at more than twice their 2019/20 level and are still going up.

Malcolm Graham, chief executive of SCTS, put the limit in plain terms at Holyrood’s Criminal Justice Committee on 9 September 2026. The increase in courts will have a limited impact, he said, because the extra High Court venues are being carved out of efficiencies elsewhere. Scotland has “run out of road for dealing with this system challenge by just increasing the size of the system.” Recruiting an “exorbitant” number of extra people would still leave too few courtrooms.

From January 2027 the High Court is due to run 26 trial courts, 18% more than in March 2026, with an extra preliminary hearing court from October 2026. Sheriff solemn trial courts fall to 20 and sheriff summary to 28 as capacity is moved toward the most serious work. SCTS modelling says scheduled High Court trials and waiting periods will keep growing for about 18 months and then plateau from around March 2028, rather than fall back toward pre-pandemic levels.

COURT CAPACITY AND THE QUEUE

Even the new rooms are hard to staff. High Court utilisation was 78% in the first quarter of 2026/27, and judicial resource constraints accounted for 81% of non-sitting days. Four new Senators of the College of Justice were due in September 2026, with another in January 2027, plus more temporary judges. Additional capacity alone “will not therefore resolve the underlying pressure,” the August 2026 modelling paper says. Wider reform of the criminal case journey is required, including work with other justice bodies through Joining Up Justice and Criminal Case Management Reform.

Sexual Offence Cases Still Take Almost Three Years

The delay is not evenly spread. Summary business has been eased by earlier disclosure and case management. The High Court has not. Scottish Government figures for 2024/25 put the median journey from a crime first being known to police to a High Court verdict at 123 weeks, about two years and four months, with the court stage 45 weeks of that. SCTS modelling projects the court-stage wait alone could reach 135 weeks by 2028/29.

Sexual offence cases sit at the long end of that queue. In 2024/25 the median journey for an accused person charged with at least one sexual crime who received a High Court verdict was 1,069 days, two years and 11 months, and 22 days longer than in 2023/24. Rape and attempted rape rose by 36 days, from 1,026 days to 1,062 days.

THE HIGH COURT LOAD

• Sexual share: A Lord Advocate-commissioned review found sexual offences account for 70% of High Court business in Scotland.
• Recorded crime: Police recorded 16,430 sexual crimes in 2025/26, a 10% rise in a year and the highest figure since comparable records began in 1971.
• Demand: COPFS recorded 162,449 criminal reports in 2025/26, up 19% from 136,906 in 2024/25, and Graham told MSPs that 36.5% of the demand rise since 2024/25 relates to the High Court.
• Crown volume: High Court indictments averaged 116 a month in 2025/26, up 26% on 92 a month the year before.

Graham told the committee that victims could wait up to four years in the High Court if the system does not “do something differently from the time that they report their crime to the time that the case is resolved.” Delays of that length, he said, “ultimately, potentially undermine the rule of law in the country.”

Parliament has already legislated for a specialist, trauma-informed sexual offences court in the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, passed in September 2025. It is not in the modelling. SCTS said in August there was not enough information to judge its effect on demand, capacity or case progression.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The law: The 2025 Act establishes the court.
• The warning: Graham told the Public Audit Committee on 8 October 2026 there were “too many variables” to put a date on it, and that it was not entirely within his control.
• The caseload: He said preparatory work done before the Act had become “historical,” including a doubling of sexual offence cases at the High Court.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Go-live: No operational date has been set.
• Money: Catriona Dalrymple, the Scottish Government’s director for justice, said funding was expected to feature in the 2027/28 budget, due from the finance secretary in early December 2026.
• Start of work: Justice Secretary Neil Gray said in September 2026 that establishing the court would be “difficult to deliver” but “necessary,” and that work would not begin until 2027.

Graham warned MSPs that simply transferring cases between courts without improving processes would undermine the Act. Yvette Greener, chief operating officer at the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, told the Criminal Justice Committee the service faced a £6 million budget reduction the following year, equal to about 100 staff.

The Digital Work Already Done Inside Each Agency

Scotland is not starting from paper. Each justice body has spent years putting its own work online. The handoff is where that work still breaks.

SCTS’s corporate plan for 2026 to 2029 is blunt about the split. Civil business has Civil Online and a single integrated case management system for live Court of Session cases. “Progress in the criminal justice system has been partial and slow.” The current criminal case management system “is in need of significant reform.” Integration between systems is low, with continued reliance on paper records and manual processing, “leading to duplication of effort.”

That is the same diagnosis the vendor pitch will sell next week, and it is already in an official plan laid before Parliament in July 2026. Lord Pentland, the Lord President and SCTS board chairman, wrote that nationally criminal trial backlogs have recovered in numerical terms, “although this masks a growing volume of serious business in the High Court,” and that this is not a challenge any single organisation can solve on its own.

LIVE DIGITAL KIT, STILL AGENCY BY AGENCY

• DESC: The Scottish Government’s £33 million digital evidence sharing programme, rolled out nationally from 2024, lets police, prosecutors, defence lawyers, court staff and judges collect and view evidence without passing discs and drives.
• Defence Agent Service: DAS gives solicitors one login for disclosure and DESC material, replacing older secure drop systems.
• Summary Case Management: Fully rolled out across sheriff courts in January 2026, it has cut scheduled summary trials by pushing key evidence in earlier and reducing trial diets that never needed to run.
• Witness Gateway: COPFS is adding victim impact statements and witness expenses online, and plans to extend the service to High Court cases.
• Evidence by commissioner: More than 1,000 witnesses gave pre-recorded evidence this way in 2025/26.

Andrew Laing, then deputy head of Local Court at COPFS, said seeing CCTV or doorbell footage as soon as police reported a case had helped prosecutors make quicker decisions and share material faster with the defence. DESC began on summary business, with solemn cases intended later. Body-worn video from Police Scotland’s rollout that started on 26 March 2025 also lands on DESC.

Sheriff solemn scheduled trials were 1,116 in the August 2026 modelling, still twice the 500 recorded in 2019/20. COPFS plans to register 575 sheriff solemn indictments a month in 2026/27. Summary Case Management can shrink the petty queue. It does not shorten a multi-accused High Court rape trial.

Why Joining Up Justice Has No Formal Reply Yet

SCTS already has a name for the cross-agency work the conference will advertise. Joining Up Justice is the Criminal Justice Board’s programme for a shared operating model. Criminal Case Management Reform is the courts’ own rebuild of processes and the court digital platform that would connect, with protections, to partner systems. Graham wrote to the Cabinet Secretary for Justice on 11 August 2026 asking for a long-term government commitment to both. On 9 September he told the committee an Invest to Save bid still awaiting a reply had been submitted on behalf of the board, and that he had yet to receive a formal response.

The modelling that we published reported that victims could be waiting up to four years in the High Court if we don’t intervene and do something differently from the time that they report their crime to the time that the case is resolved.

Malcolm Graham, chief executive, Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service, Holyrood Criminal Justice Committee, 9 September 2026

The bid describes a justice system that “currently suffers from fragmented, legacy and paper-based processes, with multiple organisations delivering services independently.” It asks for specialist resource to redesign priority services end to end, set a digital-first operating model, and produce a business case for long-term change. It lists DESC, the Witness Gateway and DAS as foundations, not replacements. Partners named include SCTS, the Scottish Government, Police Scotland, COPFS, the Scottish Prison Service and Community Justice Scotland.

The letter is careful about power. The work “recognises the constitutional independence of justice bodies while enabling shared enabling infrastructure.” The Lord Advocate remains head of prosecution and death investigation, “functions which are exercised independently of any other person.” An orchestration layer that shows police, prosecutors and courts the same workflow has to live with that split, or it fails the first legal test.

HOW THE BILL ARRIVED

1. January 2022: Scheduled criminal trials peak at 43,606.
2. August 2024: National DESC rollout is announced as a 10-year, £33 million programme.
3. September 2025: The Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 is passed, including the sexual offences court.
4. January 2026: Summary Case Management completes its national sheriff-court rollout.
5. July 2026: SCTS lays its 2026-29 corporate plan, calling criminal case management “in need of significant reform.”
6. August 2026: Criminal court modelling says extra High Court rooms will not return waits to pre-pandemic levels.
7. 9 September 2026: Graham warns MSPs of four-year High Court waits and files the unanswered Invest to Save papers.
8. 8 October 2026: He tells the Public Audit Committee the sexual offences court still has no timeline.
9. 22 October 2026: Aaseya and Pegasystems run a 30-minute masterclass in Glasgow.

Graham’s public ask is not a product. It is “end-to-end reform, supported by sustained investment,” to deliver shorter and more reliable case journeys, improve data and “remove avoidable delay and duplication.”

Aaseya’s Faster Court Sat in Riyadh

The firms selling into that gap cite a Ministry of Justice that cut case resolution time by 40% and raised judge productivity by 30%. UK readers will hear “MoJ” and think of Petty France. Aaseya previously attributed those same figures to work with the Saudi Ministry of Justice, on Pega, in a transformation aimed at backlogs, overburdened judges and weak citizen visibility of case status. AI, the firms say, supported prioritisation and analysis only; judicial decisions stayed with judges.

Those percentages are the vendors’ own. They are not a Scottish evaluation, and they are not a result from the UK Ministry of Justice. Scots criminal procedure, corroboration rules, the independent Lord Advocate, and a judicially led courts service are not a ministry that owns the whole pipeline from police file to judgment. Pega’s pitch is an orchestration layer that sits across case management systems rather than replacing them. Aaseya, a Pega Government Elite Partner, says it maps live processes onto that layer. The conference brochure gives the firm seven years, 200-plus go-lives and work in more than 13 countries.

That “keep your systems” line matches what SCTS can politically say, because criminal case management still needs renewal and nobody has funded a rip-and-replace. It also leaves the hard part untouched. Transferring a police report to COPFS is already a digital act in many cases. The receiving team still needs context, a named next action, and a clear owner. Graham has been saying the same thing without software branding: national justice organisations have to operate as a more coherent system, or waits keep growing even as rooms are added.

Police Scotland is running its own track in parallel. Its Digital, Data and Technology strategy for 2025 to 2028, “Digital Reimagined,” promises better digital evidence, AI-enabled triage and closer work with justice partners by December 2028. COPFS, in its 2026/27 business plan, says it will modernise existing case management systems while gathering insight for replacements, and will pilot automation that strips low-value clerical work so staff can spend time on legal judgment. Each plan is rational inside its own walls. The victim’s clock runs across all three.

Glasgow Gets 30 Minutes on One Justice Journey

Digital Justice and Policing 2026 sits at the University of Strathclyde’s Technology and Innovation Centre on 22 October, from 08:15 to 16:30, with eight hours of CPD. The agenda is not a vendor-only room. Temporary Deputy Chief Constable Stuart Houston is listed on digital forensics. Keith Dargie, COPFS chief digital officer, sits on a panel titled “Connecting the Justice Digital Landscape” with Victim Support Scotland and the Scottish Prison Service. Marion McCormack, the Scottish Government’s lead for justice transformation, and Dene Burke, head of the SCTS Criminal Change Lab, share a later stream on justice transformation.

Adam Pink, business transformation director at Pegasystems, has 30 minutes at 12:05. The session is billed as “One Justice Journey, Many Systems: Orchestrating People, Process and AI Across Scotland’s Justice System.” Delegates are asked to bring a justice journey and leave with a plan to improve it, using workflow and governed AI on the systems they already run.

Aaseya put the same three slogans on X the day it published the pitch: trusted AI, intelligent workflows, meaningful outcomes.

Three priorities. One vision for Scotland's digital justice future.

Trusted AI. Intelligent workflows. Meaningful outcomes.

Join Aaseya & Pega at #FutureScot2026!

22 October | Glasgow, Scotland#DigitalJustice #Aaseya #Pega pic.twitter.com/raqYu5ZyUI

— Aaseya (@AaseyaIT) October 12, 2026

The public argument is not happening on that channel. It is happening in the Criminal Justice Committee and the Public Audit Committee, where Graham has already said extra rooms will not restore pre-pandemic waits, where the sexual offences court has no date, and where the board’s Digital Justice and Policing 2026 in Glasgow will meet officials who have been asking the government for a joined-up mandate since August.

Pink’s slot runs to 12:35. The Invest to Save papers were still unanswered in September. The specialist court still has no timetable. The modelling still points to a High Court plateau in 2028 at waits far above where they were before the pandemic.