SCRA : Scottish Children’s Reporter Administration

“Logica did a great job for us in acting as a catalyst with the wider Criminal Justice community on our behalf.” says Neil Hunter, CEO /Principal Reporter, SCRA

“From ACPOS’ sponsoring perspective, and the eight forces, this was one of the more successful and painless IT-related projects we have been involved with. I am conscious Logica played a pivotal role in achieving this.” says Ruaraidh Nicolson, The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland (APCOS)

SCRA is a Scottish Government non-departmental public body with responsibility for protecting children at risk. Referrals are made to SCRA about children who may be in need of legal intervention to help them address their needs and/or behavior. The referral may be made on offence grounds and/or care and protection grounds.

The Need
SCRA asked Logica to implement a new Standard Prosecution Report (SPR) protocol. This would allow the SCRA case management system to receive all of the relevant data for a juvenile (under sixteen, below the age of criminal responsibility) who had been accused of committing an offence, automatically, accurately and securely.

The Challenge

• Each of the eight forces handled young offenders in different ways.
• Three forces sub-contracted their applications management to a third party.
• Each of the forces had changes they were in the process of implementing that affected this project and had to be taken into consideration.
• The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) had particular requirements to ensure any new processes would not lead to challenges being made in court.
• The system had to be implemented within six months.
• The data being handled was highly sensitive and had to be secure at all times.
• The requirement was to put the new solution ‘live’ simultaneously across all eight forces.

Our Answer
We built an application to accept the data from each of the forces, validate it, and then create a referral record within the SCRA case management system, tagged for the correct office, to allow the local team to deal with it much more quickly.

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