Who is speaking for the accused in Scotland?

The Sunday Times published a report this week looking at how the Scottish Government funds charities, including organisations working in the area of sexual offence policy. The piece will be picked apart over the coming days. Some of what's in it is quite specific, and it'll take time before anyone can properly assess how much of it stands up.

But it lands on something this site has been examining for a while now, from a different direction.

This site has tried to set out some of that context in two recent pieces. The Story Scottish Media Will Not Tell sets out the imbalance in how Scotland's justice system is reported and reformed. The Blind Spots in the System series documents, through Freedom of Information responses, what the system cannot measure about its own most consequential procedures. The Times story sits alongside that work. It doesn't replace it.

What it adds is a mechanism.

Rape Crisis Scotland is the obvious example, not because it's doing anything unusual, but because it's the most visible. It produces briefings on legislation. It responds to consultations. It meets ministers. It sits on advisory groups. It feeds into discussions about how sexual offence cases should be handled and how things should change. None of that is hidden. The organisation's own published material sets it out: its policy resources and briefings, its 2022–23 annual report, the COPFS statement on improving the experience for sexual crime victims, and a Scottish Parliament written answer on RCS involvement.

You'd expect organisations like this to advocate. That's what they're there for, and there's nothing improper about doing it. The issue isn't the advocacy. It's what sits on the other side of it, or rather what doesn't.

There isn't an equivalent presence arguing from the position of the accused. Not in a consistent way. Not across the same spaces. You can point to individual lawyers, individual campaigners, individual cases that attract attention. But that's different from something built into the process, something that shows up in every consultation and every advisory discussion.

That absence probably wouldn't matter as much if the system were measuring its own outcomes clearly. But as the FOI material published here has established, it isn't. Scotland cannot tell you with any precision how often an allegation turns out to have no basis in fact. Cases that don't proceed are grouped together. Lack of evidence and no offence sit in the same administrative space. It isn't broken out in a way that allows anyone to go back and examine it properly.

I'm not sure most people realise that gap exists. It's the kind of thing you'd assume was being tracked, even if only internally. Maybe it is, in some form that isn't accessible from outside. But from the outside it isn't there.

The organisations involved in shaping policy have a presence that's visible, consistent, and funded. The experiences on the other side, cases that collapsed, acquittals, the years that don't reset, are harder to pin down and largely aren't in the room when decisions are made.

It doesn't leave much of a trace.

The Times piece approaches this through the question of how close charities should be to government. That argument will run its course through the usual political channels. But there's a question sitting slightly to the side of it that's less about propriety and more about what the arrangement produces over time.

If the organisations consistently present when policy is shaped are funded to advocate for one perspective, the balance the system claims to maintain has to be coming from somewhere else. It has to be built into the courts, the rules of evidence, the rights of the accused.

Whether it was is exactly what Daly and Keir forced into the open. The Supreme Court found in November 2025 that Scottish courts had been conducting trials incompatibly with the right to a fair trial for over a decade. The procedural safeguards that were supposed to hold the line weren't working as Parliament intended.

The Times story is about money. The deeper question is what the money sustains.

And what it doesn't.