SEPA, as Scotland’s hydrometric and flood warning authority, and a civil contingency category one responder, provides a range of real time data including Floodline flood alerts and warnings; rainfall data at over 250 locations and water level data at over 400 locations in Scotland. Through an on-going technology improvement programme, SEPA has increased the timeliness of rainfall and water level real time data.

SEPA continues to develop its data and explore how its use may be expanded including sharing data through Application Programming Interfaces for organisations to ingest into their own websites or systems; prioritising data by internet searches during major flood incidents; and exploring how to better integrate flood warning and water levels information and to simplify real time access to the information.

The following table shows the percentage of criminal cases reported to COPFS by Police Scotland.

COPFS uses a live, operational database to manage the processing of reports submitted to Procurators Fiscal by the police and other reporting agencies throughout Scotland. It is designed to meet business needs in the processing of criminal cases, rather than for statistical analysis. This question as currently framed cannot be readily answered by COPFS.

The following table shows the number of criminal cases reported to COPFS with a first substantive marking for court proceedings.

The following table sets out the number of requests where there has been no disclosure of any information (fully exempted):

COPFS communicates with bereaved relatives in every case before proceeding with cases involving fatalities and continues to do so during those court proceedings. The Family Liaison Charter sets out the Crown’s obligations in relation to liaising with and providing information to bereaved relatives. These obligations apply equally to deaths arising in any area of Scotland.

The various specialist death investigation teams within COPFS consider deaths from all over the country, therefore communication with families in respect of fatalities occurring in Aberdeen, may be undertaken by staff situated in offices other than Aberdeen.

The following table shows percentage of cases reported to the Aberdeen Procurator Fiscal’s Office containing one or more charge under - Misuse of Drugs Act 1971.

The Scottish Government have previously published in an FOI response that £519,842.13 inc VAT was spent on investigating the creation of a Scottish public energy company. This information is available in detail at Public money spent on state run energy company: FOI release - gov.scot.

As SEPA are directly responsible for its day-to-day operations, I have asked Nicole Paterson, Chief Executive of SEPA to respond. Her response is as follows:

As part of the early implementation of the enhanced out-of-hours service, SEPA successfully managed 182 calls that were received outside of working hours during the first four weeks of operation. This included 24 emergency service calls and 158 general inquiries, with a total of 21 calls requiring escalation, all of which were resolved promptly.

SEPA will continue to monitor call performance and customer experience through continuous engagement and involvement of the customer hub team and colleagues across the service, and through customer feedback surveys. A customer experience manager with significant experience of managing contact centres has been appointed to ensure the effective planning and performance management of SEPA’s customer service.

There is no change to how the public contact SEPA’s 24-7 service. The public are still able to use the same telephone number or online contact form to report incidents.

SEPA’s external website provides clear information on how to contact SEPA and report an incident Contact us | Beta | SEPA | Scottish Environment Protection Agency.