When claiming for electronic material, there are three issues that need to be addressed:
(a) Proof that the material was served as part of the prosecution case
(b) Provide an explanation as to why the electronic material should be treated as PPE – rather than being remunerated as special preparation
(c) What is the page count
Where the page count is not well over 10,000, the issue of determining the true page count can be tricky. The CPS sometimes provide a notional page count figure on their letter(s) serving the electronic material. However, this figure is not really of any value (it can include pages that could never be remunerated as PPE and how the CPS came to the figure provided is frequently a mystery) and it is always necessary to provide a schedule detailing how you have arrived at your figure for the page count. I will look at some other page count issues in future blogs but one recent interesting SCCO judgement is the case of R v Zigarars. There, some of the pages were actually A1 size rather than the more typical A4 size. An A1 size page is 8 times the size of an A4 page. Costs Judge Leonard ruled that each A1 page should be treated as 4 A4 pages on the basis that “the data which fills each of the A1 PDF pages can be rendered realistically legible and workable if presented in A2 size, which is the equivalent of four A4 pages”.
A1 pages are frequently used for telephone data and can usually be easily spotted by the fact that when opened in a PDF viewer, the print is so small, they are virtually illegible. However, the position can be confirmed by clicking on “properties” in the “file” menu which confirms the size of the page.
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