Thematic report on the use of compensation offers, and combined fiscal fines and compensation offers

5.1 As previously indicated a random selection of cases was examined. In the case of Combined Offers 120 were looked at and in the case of stand alone Compensation Offers 151 were examined. These were offers issued on the Crown Office IT system during May 2009. This random sampling covered all 7 possible levels of Fiscal Fine and the numbers examined by Area according to the level is as per the undernoted tables.

5.2 Fiscal Fines fall into 7 possible levels (£50, £75, £100, £150, £200, £250 and £300). Compensation Offers (for monitoring purposes) are divided into 5 Bands for management information purposes (up to £100, £200, £500, £1,000 and over £1,000). Clearly in combined cases there will be a Fiscal Fine level and a Compensation Band. The tables below show for stand alone Compensation Offers the Band into which they fell and for combined offers show the Fiscal Fine level which applied.

5.3 This combined total of 271 cases was out of a total of 355 of all such direct measures issued that month, meaning that the sample was approximately 75% of all such cases issued that month. In addition to that sample, the earlier sample of 240 Compensation Offers and Combined Offers from September 2008 was examined and the analysis of that earlier sample is contained in Annex I and Annex II.

5.4 For the purposes of this review the analysis was concentrated on the sample from May 2009 but with some cross referencing to the earlier sample.

5.5 The type of cases covered included a wide range of both statutory and common law offences.

5.6 Common law offences included assault, breach of the peace, fraud and theft.

5.7 Statutory offences included vandalism, certain vehicle excise offences and a small miscellaneous group of infrequent offences.

Combined Fiscal Fine/Compensation Offers - May 2009

A breakdown of the charges for the review of Combined Offers are as follows:

A breakdown of the charges for the review of Compensation Offers are as follows:

5.8 It can be seen that for Compensation Offers alone vandalism accounted for 57% of the cases. Assaults represented 14% of the total. In Combined Offers road tax offences accounted for 35%, vandalism 31% and assaults 12.5%.

5.9 All of the cases were examined against Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service guidance and those with apparent non-compliance were raised with the issuing office for comments. In total 38 queries were raised with the relevant Procurator Fiscal office, 10 in respect of combined offers and 28 in respect of stand alone offers. This is about 14% of the total. Where the same situation arose more than once, only one enquiry was made.

5.10 In relation to stand alone offers queries included why a combined offer had not been made, length of time it would take to pay (in some cases several years) and in a small number of cases why there had been no prosecution.

5.11 In relation to combined offers queries included why nothing had been added for apparent aggravations, whether the compensation level was too high and why there had been no prosecution in some cases.

5.12 It must be stressed that most of these queries were of a minor nature and generally accepted by the issuing offices. In four cases we felt the offer was wrong. In two cases of assault we considered that prosecution should have followed and this was accepted by the Area Procurator Fiscal. In a further two cases there was insufficient evidence in one case and in the other compensation was offered albeit there had been full recovery (and it was therefore inappropriate).

5.13 When we looked at Fiscal Fines on their own in our earlier report our random sampling threw up 18 cases of vandalism where no Compensation Offer was made. This raises the issue of the general approach to prioritising compensation (see Recommendation 1).