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DISABILITY EQUALITY ACTION PLAN
Name of Directorate or Agency
Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service ( COPFS)
Directorate or Agency Responsibilities.
The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service ( COPFS) is Scotland's sole national prosecution service. We also investigate sudden and suspicious deaths, carry out independent inquiries into complaints of criminal conduct by police officers and administer property falling to the Crown. Our core functions include:
- the prosecution of crime;
- the investigation of sudden, suspicious, unexpected or unexplained deaths and, when appropriate, the conduct of public inquiries;
- identifying and meeting the information needs of victims, witnesses and bereaved relatives;
- provision of accessible information to all service users: interpreting, translation and transcription;
- employment and estates
Statement of Directorate/Agency Commitment to the Promotion of Disability Equality and how this helps to deliver Government's national purpose and outcomes.
COPFS is committed to tackling the sources of inequality faced by disabled people so as to ensure that the delivery of our services is fair, inclusive and accessible. We aim to actively involve disabled people in making equal opportunities central to our service delivery, employment of staff and development of policies and practice and to take action to eliminate unlawful discrimination and prevent harassment.
The priorities and goals set out in our Action Plan have been incorporated by our Area Procurator Fiscals and Business Managers into Area and local business plans and are reflected in the performance objectives of our most senior managers.
COPFS is fully committed to each of the six principals contained within the Disability Equality Duty.
What is known about the experiences of, and issues for, disabled people within the Directorate/Agency Responsibilities
COPFS takes the view that there are disability equality issues across all of our functions, for victims, witnesses, nearest relatives, accused persons and our staff, visitors and stakeholders.
To help us identify those experiences and issues, we are committed to gathering and examining evidence about current performance and measuring our progress towards disability equality in relation to the full range of our services and functions. Our current information includes: Human Resources Division statistics on staff declared disabilities; recruitment and development data; and staff satisfaction surveys. We plan to gather information through customer feedback and satisfaction surveys; and targeted short-term sampling of case processing.
Our Action Plan reflects the active involvement of disabled people in decisions about what improvements are needed to the way we run our services, so that what we do is fairer, more inclusive and more accessible. This has helped us plan how to improve our performance and make a real difference to the way disabled people are treated within our organisation. Our involvement strategy includes:
- Our Staff Disability Advisory Group, comprising individual staff with disabilities and other interested members. A disability equality trainer is a full time member and facilitator.
- Our external Equality Advisory Group, with disabled members, recently extended to ensure increased representation of mental heath equality issues.
- Our continuing engagement of disability equality trainers to help deliver our diversity awareness programme.
- Our Procurator Fiscal Area plans to use local disability organisations in local training events.
- Consideration of a 'pan-justice' disability forum
COPFS is also involved in the introduction and implementation of workable and effective legislation to create a new statutory aggravation to cover behaviour that appears to be motivated by prejudice towards somebody's disability. We are working collaboratively to develop prosecution policy in consultation with affected groups.
Disability Equality Action Plan
The COPFS Disability Equality Action Plan sets out our priority policy areas and planned activity in relation to disability equality across all of our functions. The Plan sets out actions specifically on disability issues identified from evidence and involvement and those actions where disability is being mainstreamed into our policy, activity and processes.
The COPFS arrangements for delivering each of the six parts of the general duty are set out in our 2007 Annual Report. COPFS welcomes the Cross-Government Commitment set out in this Scheme in relation to the general duty to promote disability equality and we will seek to adopt these actions as part of our second annual review in December 2007.
Our action plan and annual report are available at::
http://www.copfs.gov.uk/About/Departmental-Overview/diversity/action-plans/index
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