Community Payback Orders – Unpaid Work or Other Activity Requirements – May 2024

Introduction

This is the first supplementary publication in the Justice Social Work Statistics series focusing on unpaid work or other activity requirements.

The community payback order (CPO) was introduced by the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010. There are now ten different requirements which can be imposed at the initial imposition of a CPO. Unpaid work or other activity is one of the most common requirements imposed by the court. For the purposes of this paper, unpaid work or other activity will be referred to as “unpaid work” for ease of reading.

An unpaid work requirement requires a person to pay back to their community through their work. The work undertaken, as well as being reparative, should be of clear tangible benefit to the local community. Payback may involve requiring the individual to take responsibility for their own behaviour by spending time, through the "other activity" component of the requirement, on developing their interpersonal, educational, and vocational skills to support long-term desistance from offending. Unpaid work or other activity requirements can be no lower than the minimum of 20 hours and cannot exceed 300 hours.

Local authorities are responsible for delivering and monitoring CPOs that are imposed on individuals who have been given a sentence by the court. During the years which were most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, it was more difficult for local authorities to deliver CPOs. This was particularly the case for CPOs with unpaid work requirements, which were substantially more difficult to carry out due to national lockdowns and measures to keep people safe during 2020 and 2021.

The Scottish Government started collecting management data from May 2020 to look at the changing position of unpaid work hours being progressed by justice social work. An occasional statistical paper: The Effect of COVID-19 on Community Payback Order Unpaid Work or Other Activity Requirements was published in November 2023. That paper examined the management data against a mathematical estimation model to see the effect the pandemic had on progressing CPO unpaid work requirements. It concluded that the delays created by the COVID-19 pandemic were influencing the number of unpaid work hours to be progressed in March 2023 at a national level. This cannot be quantified exactly due to the continuous nature of progressing unpaid work requirements.

The Scottish Government is continuing with this data collection for at least another year. The management information is more timely but is considered an estimate, due to the differences in collection and timing of the extraction of the management data from local authorities.

Local authority information can be found in the excel table supporting this document. As this is management information being extracted from various IT systems without standardisation of data collection, it is strongly advised not to compare local authorities against each other, for the following reasons:

• Time periods between collections at the start of the series were irregular until it became a quarterly collection in May 2022.
• Some data points in the collection contain statistical approximations, where a local authority could not make a return. This tended to be due to staff illness or due to local authorities moving between old and new management information systems. Where this is the case, the information from the last collection has been increased/decreased by the same percentage as the difference at Scotland level between the two time points.
• For each collection, the local authority is given a one week period and asked to provide the information as at one of the days during this period. The information will therefore not be at the exact same time point for all areas and so is not consistent.
• The data is subject to limited data checks, such as checking high levels of change from the previous period within the local authority. Therefore, the management information is seen as providing a broadly indicative estimate, rather than a precise measure of activity. This can lead to revisions to the previous quarter’s return.
• The situation across local authorities inevitably varied due to different factors during the COVID-19 pandemic, as social restrictions could vary from local authority to local authority.

This publication is official statistics. Official statistics are statistics that are produced by crown bodies, those acting on behalf of crown bodies, or those specified in statutory orders, as defined in the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007.

Scottish Government statistics are regulated by the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR). OSR sets the standards of trustworthiness, quality and value in the Code of Practice for Statistics that all producers of official statistics should adhere to.