Scotland’s High Court Trial Backlog Triples to 1,000 Cases

About 1,000 trials were waiting to go ahead in Scotland’s High Court at the end of March, almost three times the pre-pandemic level, according to a follow-up audit published this month by Audit Scotland. The system-wide backlog has fallen to 13,268 outstanding scheduled trials, roughly a third of the 2022 peak, so the headline progress is real. The pile-up at the top of the pyramid is where the system now hurts.

That split, summary courts clearing fast while the High Court fills with serious organised-crime prosecutions and historic sex-abuse cases, is the reckoning the Scottish justice system has been quietly walking toward since 2020. Long sentences, fewer plea deals, and an inquiry-fed pipeline of complaints have collided with a prison estate already past its design capacity.

The Headline Number: 1,000 Trials, Triple the Pre-Pandemic Floor

The auditor general’s criminal courts backlog follow-up tracks the recovery against recommendations made in May 2023. Most of those recommendations have moved forward. Three are recorded as achieved. The headline measure, total outstanding scheduled trials, has fallen sharply.

The High Court is the exception, and a stark one. Stephen Boyle, the auditor general for Scotland, said progress is happening at “varying pace” and warned that the lack of evaluation and public reporting makes it hard to tell which interventions are doing the work.

• 1,000 High Court trials outstanding at end of March, against roughly 350 pre-pandemic.
• 13,268 outstanding scheduled trials system-wide, down from a 2022 peak above 40,000.
• 9,000 summary trials still in the queue, down from more than 30,000 during Covid.
• 29% year-on-year rise in High Court indictments registered in the first quarter of 2025/26, per the Scottish Government’s own court demand data.

“In some cases, there are many years that people will have to wait for justice, and the longer that is, the more impact that has on victims and witnesses,” Boyle said. He added that an unresolved case can weigh on an accused person’s employment and home life for the same length of time.

Why the High Court Filled Up While the Sheriff Courts Emptied

The system did not slow down uniformly. It slowed down at the level where the cases are longest, the indictments most complex, and the witnesses most reluctant. Two engines are driving the High Court load.

Serious Organised Crime Prosecutions

Police Scotland and the Crown Office have spent the past four years pursuing organised crime networks linked to the Encrochat encrypted-phone takedown of 2020 and the wider European disruption operations that followed. Those prosecutions are long, multi-accused, and indictment-heavy. They produce successful convictions, and longer sentences, which feeds back into the prison roll.

Historic Sex Abuse Cases

The Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, established in 2015 and still hearing evidence as recently as 31 March 2026, has triggered a wave of complaints to police about abuse going back decades. Combined with improved sensitive-case handling within Police Scotland, the result is more prosecutions reaching the High Court for crimes that, before 2018, would not have entered the pipeline at all.

Where the Caseloads Diverge

The contrast between the two ends of the criminal court system is wider than the system-wide average suggests.

The shape is unusual. In most legal systems coming out of a pandemic disruption, the highest-volume courts clear last because the backlog is sheer numbers. Scotland inverted that. The numbers cleared. The seriousness did not.

The Prison Population the Backlog Built

Successful prosecutions of gangsters and sex offenders are producing longer sentences. Those sentences are landing on a prison estate already past its design capacity.

Scotland’s prison population reached an all-time high of 8,441 on 11 November 2025, prompting the second emergency early-release process in two years. By early May, the population had pushed past that mark again to 8,587 inmates inside a system designed for 7,805, according to the Scottish Government’s prison projections published in February.

The drivers, taken together, look more like a structural shift than a cyclical bump:

• High Court imprisonments in the first quarter of 2025/26 ran 15% above the equivalent pre-pandemic quarter.
• Sheriff solemn imprisonments ran 31% above the 2019/20 baseline.
• The remand population sat at 2,156 in February, accounting for more than a quarter of all prisoners.
• Short-term prisoners now release at the 30% point of sentence rather than 40%, a permanent rule change that excludes domestic-abuse and sexual-offence convictions.

The Scottish Prison Service released 428 people between November and February under the latest emergency mechanism. The roll climbed back above its starting point within weeks.

The Witness Attrition Risk Victim Groups Keep Naming

For the people the prosecutions are for, delay is the punishment that arrives before the verdict. Victim Support Scotland’s interim chief executive Debbie Adams said thousands of people are “trapped in a state of uncertainty while awaiting trial” and have to hold traumatic experiences front-of-mind for months or years.

Witness attrition, the point at which a witness withdraws and a case collapses, is the risk her organisation flags repeatedly to ministers.

The reality is that thousands of people impacted by crime remain trapped in a state of uncertainty while awaiting trial. This means victims have their lives on hold for longer, having to preserve their traumatic experiences at the front of their minds for months, if not years, on end. Witness attrition, where witnesses drop out of a trial altogether, is a huge risk.

Debbie Adams, interim chief executive of Victim Support Scotland, in response to the audit. Median time from offence to verdict across all Scottish crime types now sits at 896 days, according to SCTS data cited in the Scottish Government’s prison-projections paper. For sexual-offence complainers, the wait is typically longer because the cases are routed to the High Court.

The Not Proven Reform Lands in the Same Window

On 1 January 2026, the not-proven verdict was abolished for all new criminal trials in Scotland. Juries can now return only guilty or not guilty. The same legislation, the Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025, raised the conviction threshold from a simple majority of 15 jurors to at least two-thirds.

That reform was designed primarily to lift Scotland’s chronically low rape conviction rate. Not proven had been used disproportionately in rape cases, making up 44% of acquittals in that category before the change.

The audit flags a second-order effect courts will now feel directly. Recent rulings, combined with the new verdict structure, are expected to produce both an increase in appeals from people already convicted of sexual offences and a rise in the number of rape allegations that the Crown chooses to prosecute. Both flow back to the High Court. Neither was in the 2023 baseline that the recovery plan was sized against.

Tony Lenehan KC, vice-dean of the Faculty of Advocates, told auditors that “a number of factors have combined to increase the present trial load. Some of those factors are temporary, but a sustained increase is expected.”

Summary Case Management: The One Thing That Worked

The brightest finding in the audit sits at the bottom of the court hierarchy. Summary Case Management, a reform led by Sheriff Principal Aisha Anwar KC and piloted from 2022 in Dundee, Hamilton and Paisley, has now rolled out nationally across summary courts.

The mechanism is simple. The prosecution discloses evidence to the defence earlier. Solicitors and accused persons get the case file at the start, not the eve of trial. A sheriff actively manages the timetable. Late guilty pleas drop. Trials that need to happen, happen on the scheduled day rather than being adjourned for months.

The numbers Sheriff Principal Anwar’s team has reported show why the SCTS is now asking whether a version of the same process could be transplanted into solemn cases:

1. 47% reduction in first witness citations and re-citations across the pilot period.
2. More than 100,000 fewer police officers cited to give evidence during the national rollout.
3. Around 3,000 fewer child witnesses cited to attend court.
4. Adjourned trials fell from 40% to 27% of the trial diet.

Anwar called the project “a change in culture” and credited “collaboration at a local and national level” for the result. The audit notes that ongoing discussions are exploring whether a similar approach can work in solemn cases held before a judge and jury, the very cases driving the High Court pile-up. The mechanics would be harder. Solemn cases involve more witnesses, more evidence, and more defence motions, and the savings per case would be smaller in percentage terms even if larger in absolute hours.

What Neil Gray Inherits

Neil Gray took over as Cabinet Secretary for Justice on 20 May, three days before the audit landed, in First Minister John Swinney’s post-election reshuffle. The portfolio that he swapped into from Health now carries the courts backlog, the prison overcrowding, the not-proven implementation, and the open question of whether SCTS can find sustainable resourcing for the solemn court estate.

Gray welcomed the audit’s recognition of “significant progress made in reducing the court backlog” and said three of the recommendations had been achieved. Paul McKinlay, executive director of court operations at SCTS, was less upbeat, predicting that the growth in serious criminal cases would “place further strain on the capacity and resources of the courts” and that sustainable resourcing was the case the service would keep making.

The Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service itself now projects more than 1,600 scheduled High Court trials by March 2028, nearly double its previous estimate, and 2,412 by March 2030 if the current trajectory holds. If the SCM model can be adapted to solemn cases inside the next 18 months, that 2,412 number bends. If it cannot, the prison roll, the witness drop-out rate, and the median 896 days to verdict will get worse before the next election cycle.