Drug Driving Outsourcing

While the outsourcing of drug driving cases (using the allocated £255,000 funding for Financial Year 2024-2025) has continued since the last update to the Forensic Services Committee, the numbers of cases outsourced per month has decreased as the internal capacity within the Criminal Toxicology team increases. Outsourcing is currently being used to free staff resource to continue with the development work required to increase resilience and capacity and to deal with any additional demand over expected levels.

Outsourcing continues at the planned levels with additional provision scheduled for times of known high demand e.g. the festive drug driving campaign.

Forensic Services noted a deterioration in the timeliness of provision of drug driving reports from our outsource partner during the latter part of Q3 2023/24.  Significant improvements in the outsourcing case profile have been seen within the last quarter. There are no cases at risk of time bar within the outsource provider caseload.

Current work in progress data illustrates our outsource provider is tracking ahead of projected return to contractual timescales with an 80% compliance in June which is expected to increase again within July 2024.

hile there has been a requirement to outsource an additional 34 cases in Q1 due to an increased demand and an increase in court costs, the outsource budget remains broadly on target.