Two years ago the agency restructured its case management system, on the argument that referrals were being lost between the point of receipt and the point of a charging decision. The restructure introduced a triage stage, a case register and a tracking number for every referral.
On the agency's own published figures, the average time from referral to a charging decision has moved from just under fourteen months to just under thirteen.
What the reforms addressed
The earlier problem was not that cases were being decided slowly. It was that cases were not being decided at all. Referrals could sit without an owner, and there was no reliable way to establish how many were pending.
That specific problem appears to be fixed. The agency can now state how many referrals it holds and at what stage, which it could not credibly do before.
What has not changed
The intermediate stages remain the bottleneck. Triage routes a case to an investigating team quickly. What happens between that routing and a recommendation on charging has not changed materially, and that is where the time is spent.
- Triage and registration: days, not months, since the reform.
- Investigation and recommendation: the dominant share of elapsed time, largely unchanged.
- Charging decision: short, once a recommendation exists.
Why the middle is hard to reform
The middle stage depends on people and evidence rather than process. A case register can be built; investigators and forensic capacity cannot be built by reorganisation. The figures are consistent with a system that has become better at knowing what it holds without becoming faster at handling it.
This reading is provisional. The agency has not published stage-by-stage timings, and without them the share of time attributable to each stage is inference rather than measurement.
