Our operating environment and challenges
The CPS business plan sets out our priorities for the year ahead, but in doing so it must also respond to the environment in which we work. Our operating context is both challenging and evolving – in the year ahead, we will need to balance a desire to deliver important changes with pragmatism and flexibility to succeed.
The pandemic has changed the CPS immeasurably, and we will continue to feel its impact even as we move towards a post-pandemic era. We still face a significant backlog of cases, which our operational delivery plans need to address while simultaneously facilitating improvements to our ways of working. We can take confidence from the organisation’s remarkable response to the pandemic, continuing to develop our digital capability to deliver independent and fair prosecutions through a supported, agile workforce. The pandemic also accelerated and altered the changing nature of crime, making it more difficult than ever to predict trends and subsequent demand in the criminal justice system. This complex and ever-changing environment requires ongoing work with our partners to identify emerging trends, and respond with the necessary skills, tools and guidance to keep cases moving through the system.
The digitisation of information and processes is transforming the criminal justice system, presenting major challenges and equally significant opportunities. The CPS continues to lead the way in its rapid adoption of digital working, giving us a strong foundation to build on. We will capitalise on this by investing in digital tools, systems, and processes. We will make sure that cases and information can be shared securely and efficiently with our partners. These commitments will be underpinned by effective collaboration, offering opportunities to join up systems, enhance the quality of casework, and deal more effectively with increasingly complex and burgeoning case files.
We face understandable public scrutiny on our prosecution of some of the most complex and appalling crimes, especially rape and serious sexual offences (RASSO) cases. We are absolutely committed to improving RASSO prosecutions and the experiences of victims and witnesses. The prominence and scale of the challenge is reflected throughout this plan, with the inclusion of Operation Soteria and the RASSO performance framework. We have also included our planned delivery against existing public commitments: our Joint National Action Plan with the police, our five-year RASSO 2025 strategy and our response to the Government’s Rape Review. This work is truly system wide, stretching across the CPS, the police, and the courts – it is only together that we can we ensure justice for victims.
Meeting these challenges and delivering the ambitious programme of work outlined here will not be possible without the right people in place. We are expanding the number of core roles working to deliver our commitments – but the expertise required, combined with the complexity of our work, means this will take time. We will be working tirelessly to fill the legal roles necessary to reduce the backlog, improve performance and increase our capability. This will be supported by our refreshed approach to strategic resourcing, as well as enhancing our inclusive culture, prioritising wellbeing, and increasing hybrid models of working.
We know that we will be operating in a complex and evolving environment for years to come – but we remain confident that the improvements we are prioritising will not only address these challenges, but also safeguard our ability to deliver fair and independent prosecutions long term.