This article is built from the written response provided by the Scottish Courts and Tribunals Service (SCTS) to a Freedom of Information request.

We asked for aggregated, administrative data only. No case papers. No private details. Just the sort of management information any modern court system should be able to produce.

In November 2025, the UK Supreme Court made clear that Scotland’s approach to Sections 274 and 275 has been applied too rigidly, risking Article 6 fair trial breaches. The courts are now expected to take a more careful, case-specific approach.

Critical Context:

• 🔗 Press summary: Daly v HMA / Keir v HMA
• 🔗 Judgment: UKSC-2023-0107
• 🔗 Lord Advocate letter (2 Dec 2025)

The Supreme Court has warned that an overly rigid approach to sections 274 and 275 is liable to produce Article 6 unfairness in real cases. But Scotland cannot even begin to measure how big that risk has been over time if the court service cannot reliably count section 275 applications, cannot publish outcome rates, and does not produce internal monitoring reports. 

If we don’t have clean, consistent data going back a decade, we can’t answer the most basic public-interest question: how often has this gate been used, how often has it been granted or refused, and has practice drifted into something the Supreme Court has now warned against?

SCTS supplied yearly totals for Section 275 entries. On the face of it, the trend is dramatic, rising from 243 to 564 in just four years.

From 2020/21 to 2024/25 is an increase of about 132%. That’s more than doubling. However, because SCTS can only record one event per case, the true volume is unknown.

The system is described as “live operational,” designed to process court business rather than for statistics. SCTS admitted it “does not have functionality to identify all 275 applications recorded.”

Section 275 is a legal gate with fair trial consequences. If Scotland is being told to apply these rules with more nuance, it must be able to measure what’s actually happening. You can’t fix what you refuse to track.

We asked how many applications were marked granted, refused, or withdrawn. SCTS refused. They treat these outcomes as exempt under section 37(1) of FOISA because they sit within court records (minutes).

The public is shown headline totals that undercount reality, but are denied the data on how often applications are granted. This removes the only metrics that allow us to test consistency and legality across the system.

SCTS confirmed that no internal statistical summaries, dashboards, or management reports exist for Section 275. If the Supreme Court has flagged the national approach as legally risky, why is no one watching the gate?

We have requested an internal review. We are asking SCTS to confirm if the system contains any structured, non-minute fields (like a status code or workflow flag) that record an outcome. If it doesn’t, the public deserves to know that outcomes aren’t stored in a searchable form at all.

Four Minimum Fixes

• Record each application as a separate event.
• Attach structured fields for outcomes (granted/refused).
• Publish annual national aggregate statistics.
• Commission independent auditing of Section 275 practice.