The Crown Prosecution Service
Annual Report and Accounts 2025-2026

Key performance indicators

Increasing our capacity

Our progress:

Over the past year, we have continued to strengthen the capability of our people and our organisation. This is important because we must have the capability and capacity as an organisation to deliver independent, fair and effective public prosecutions across England and Wales.

We have made strong progress against our business plan commitments, with ongoing investment in our people, and growing the frontline teams who deliver justice every day. A Crown Advocate is a CPS lawyer who presents cases in court. Through our renewed approach, we are seeing successful recruitment and clear progression through the Crown Advocate levels, with our advocates building experience, confidence and professional expertise. We have continued to grow our own talent which is reflected in the continued expansion of our Legal Trainee Scheme, with 120 trainees due to join the CPS throughout 2026.

This year we wanted to grow our number of digital, data and technology professionals to ensure we have the skills and capacity to maximise the opportunities digital innovation presents. While we did not achieve our ambitious target, we did see significant growth over the year. We are confident that we can achieve this, and it remains a key performance measure for 2026-27.

Alongside this, we have maintained a strong focus on continuous improvement. This year, our Continuous Improvement team began their visits to CPS Areas following a successful pilot in London North. These visits support frontline teams to identify and address what slows work down, making processes clearer, quicker and more consistent through small, practical changes led by the people doing the job. The result is less rework, fewer unnecessary steps, and more time focused on what matters, delivering justice.

This is reflected in our People Survey 2025 results. Scores improved across all nine core themes compared with 2024, with our highest-scoring theme remaining Organisational Objectives and Purpose at 91%. This consistently high-scoring field is a testament to our peoples’ belief in the work of the CPS and the role we play in delivering fair and impartial justice. Our Employee Engagement Index, an overall engagement score measuring pride, advocacy, attachment, inspiration and motivation, increased three percentage points to 68% and above the Civil Service average of 65%. While there is more to do, a refreshed planning and reporting approach for People Survey actions will support a continuous cycle of learning and improvement, ensuring we build on progress and deliver meaningful, lasting change for our people.

Increasing our casework quality

Our progress:

Given the difficult operational context this year, we have worked hard to make progress in improving case quality, with a focus on getting cases right first time and supporting timely, fair outcomes. Performance in the Magistrates’ Courts remained consistently strong, with the proportion of guilty pleas at the first hearing meeting national targets throughout the year.

However, performance in the Crown Court remains challenging. We can see that the backlog and long delays before trials are listed are acting as a disincentive for defendants to plead guilty at an early stage. Defendants understand that their case may not be heard for three years or more by which time witnesses may have disengaged or their personal circumstances may have changed. This leads to fewer early guilty pleas, meaning the case must be listed for trial, which in turn adds further delay to the system. We must ensure we are doing everything we can to improve our performance alongside playing our part in making a success of wider reform.

We continue to focus on improving the quality and consistency of how we prosecute. Following the report by HMCPSI in early 2025 on our approach to assessing and improving our casework quality, we committed to implementing a new approach to first line assurance of our legal decision making and we have done so. This year we have replaced the Individual Quality Assessment with a new Case Strategy Assessment regime. This approach places our case strategy principles at the heart of every decision, with a refreshed question set design to reflect these principles and promote deeper discussion and learning. This matters because strong legal decisions, made consistently and at the right time, help cases progress faster, treat victims and defendants fairly and ensure justice is done. While it is early days for this new approach, we hope to see it support our people to continue to improve.

We are delivering a new Rape Action Plan to strengthen legal decision-making, improve case strategy, prioritise victim safety and increase public confidence. The action plan focuses on enhanced assurance of legal decision-making, supporting and upskilling prosecutors, and building stronger public confidence in how rape cases are handled.

Together, these improvements aim to embed higher standards of case handling across the CPS, support fairness for defendants, improve experiences for victims and witnesses, and drive greater confidence in the justice system.

Reducing delays in the criminal justice system

Our progress:

This year we continued to focus on reducing delays across the criminal justice system, recognising the impact long waits have on victims, witnesses and defendants. Our work has prioritised making decisions faster, improving the flow of cases through the system and reducing avoidable disruption. This has been achieved through clearer national approaches to decision-making, improved operational processes and closer collaboration with criminal justice partners, particularly the police and the courts.

While we set the key business plan objectives, a small number of complex digital projects took longer than expected to put in place. This was because new systems needed more testing and coordination with partners including the police, which slowed delivery but helped ensure the solutions are robust and work well in practice. More widely, we are seeing the benefits of our dedication to digital innovation and automation pay off. The casework app, including improvements to the app to help prosecutors make charging decisions, has saved more than 450,000 hours of legal and operational time since it was introduced, including saving 235,000 hours this year. Our email automation service has handled more than 3.2 million emails this year and 5.5 million emails in total since its launch, reducing manual effort to free up valuable time. The work management app gives our frontline teams a clear, daily view of tasks, replacing manual spreadsheets and helping teams prioritise, saving 4,600 hours of our people’s time this year and 6,500 hours since launch.

We have also continued to improve timeliness in core prosecution processes. While we did not achieve our target of 75% in our charging reviews or decisions being made on time, it is the highest it has been for over three years demonstrating an improving picture given the increasing workload in that time. We are maintaining this as a key priority in 2026-27 and will have two KPIs, one will focus on ensuring we are making ‘red’ charging reviews or decisions within three hours for the most urgent of cases.

Performance reporting shows our hard work has resulted in sustained progress in disclosure compliance and consistent system availability, supporting smoother case progression once matters reach court. This is important to ensure progression of cases at the earliest opportunity. While wider pressures remain across the criminal justice system, these improvements are helping to reduce avoidable delays and support more timely access to justice.

Increasing trust in the CPS

Our progress:

This year, we focused on earning trust by improving how we handle some of the most serious and sensitive cases, and by being clearer and more consistent in the way we work with victims. We know that for many people, contact with the criminal justice system comes at a time of trauma and uncertainty, and how we respond matters.

A key step forward was publishing our Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) Strategy, alongside updated prosecution guidance and a national Stalking Action Plan. Together, these set out how the CPS and the police will work more closely to identify, investigate and prosecute these cases effectively, while treating victims with care and respect. Our aim is to give victims greater confidence that their cases are taken seriously and handled sensitively.

We know that trust is built through people’s experiences of our work, and this year we did not meet our ambitious trust-related KPIs, meaning some victims did not hear from us on time. While we did better than last year, we recognise that we must go further to ensure victims hear from us at the right time, and in the way they deserve, in line with our statutory responsibilities. In 2026-27, we will focus more sharply on making sure victims, especially those who are considered vulnerable, receive timely and clear information and feel supported throughout their case. This will be tracked through two new key performance indicators.

For victims of domestic abuse, we have worked more closely with the police to make sure decisions are made earlier, cases are built more carefully from the start, and problems are identified sooner. This is done through the Domestic Abuse Joint Justice Plan, which has been implemented across all CPS Areas, supported by new guidance. This helps cases progress more smoothly and reduces the risk of unnecessary delays later on. Alongside this, we evaluated charging pilots designed to improve joint working with the police and deliver more consistent case building. Since the launch of the plan in November 2024, there has been a referral increase from 18,614 cases in Q2 24/25 to 20,752 in Q4 25/26 equating to 11.5%, meaning more cases have been referred to us for a decision on charging. This gives us reason to be confident that these cases are being taken seriously and handled properly by everyone.

Over recent years, we have also taken steps to improve how hate crime cases are handled. Measures introduced include training, assurance schemes, operational instructions and detailed guidance, all designed to support a consistent and effective approach to every case. This year, the hate crime sentence uplift rate reached 81.3%, higher than in previous years. This shows our strong performance in evidencing the extra harm these offences cause, ensuring that seriousness is reflected in the sentence imposed by the court.

Alongside this work, we continued to improve fairness and transparency in our decision-making. Progress was made on the Disproportionality Action Plan, including training to help prosecutors recognise potential bias and better analysis to understand patterns across cases. We invested in helping our people communicate with empathy, understanding the impact that trauma can have and responding to victims with care and respect, including training on trauma-aware practice.

We recognise that justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done. During the year we have strengthened our communications to make our work more visible, transparent and accessible to the public.

We focused on explaining our role and decision-making in plain, accessible language so the public better understand how prosecutions work and why decisions are made.

We are improving how we communicate directly with the public through our social media channels. We gained 2,376 social media followers on average each month, reaching more than 400,000 followers in total, with strong engagement on posts explaining casework and how we operate.

In October, we launched a redesigned website shaped by user research, making it easier for visitors to find the information they need through improved accessibility, clearer navigation and a digital assistant ‘chatbot’.

Alongside this, we maintained a consistent and proactive media presence, working closely with national and regional media to ensure accurate, timely reporting of case outcomes We issued almost 500 press releases across the year and delivered dozens of broadcast media opportunities.

The criminal justice system relies on the participation of members of the public, often at a very difficult time. That’s why these improvements are important to help more people to see how justice is delivered, supporting our wider aim to build confidence that we act independently, treat everyone with fairness and respect, and pursue justice in the public interest.