Our inspection programme

Each year, we work with our stakeholders to decide what inspections we will carry out and publish the resulting inspection programme in our annual business plan.

Our stakeholders include the Law Officers, the Attorney General and Solicitor General; senior members of the judiciary; academics; Members of Parliament; representatives of specialist groups, such as victim support groups; and the organisations we inspect.

Our current inspection programme

These are our planned inspections for the 12 months to March 2023, as set out in our business plan for 2022-23.

Crown Prosecution Service inspections

  • Completion of Area Inspection Programme

Thematic inspections

  • Domestic Abuse Inspection

Please see attached the scoping framework of the inspection:

2020 07 08 HMCPSI Domestic Abuse Inspection Framework (66 kB)

Serious Fraud Office inspections

  • Case progression follow up inspection

Please see attached the scoping framework of the inspection:

Scoping Paper Inspection Framework SFO case progression follow-up (42 kB)

New for 2022-23

HMCPSI maintains a list of other subjects for inspection, which may be added to our programme if resources allow, or if the urgency to inspect them increases. For 2022–23, these subjects include the following, some of which have been carried over from the ‘long list’ from 2021–22.

  • Gang crime, ‘county lines and knife crime in the CPS
  • Induction, development and progression of prosecutors
  • Young witness protocol in the CPS

Joint Inspections

The Criminal Justice Joint Inspection Joint business plan 2022–23 contains full details of the proposed joint inspection programme for this year.

HMCPSI has committed resources in 2022-23 to the following joint inspections:

  • Joint inspection on meeting the needs of victims in the CJS

Other inspections

Sometimes we are asked to carry out inspections on short notice. Naturally, it is not possible to include these in our inspection programme, but we do build flexibility into the programme to try to make sure we can assist with short notice requests.