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

Unpaid work requirements progress to 2022-23

Key point: At the beginning of the financial year 2023-24, there were 9,100 CPOs with unpaid work requirements to be progressed. Of these, 93% of these were imposed by the courts in 2021-22 and 2022-23 . The percentages of those finished within the year of imposition or the following year has reduced due to the impact of the pandemic.

There were 17,085 CPOs in total in existence on 31 March 2023. This was the third largest figure in the last ten years. The highest being on the 31 March 2017 at 17,434.

Sixty-five per cent of these CPOs (11,089) had an unpaid work requirement. The majority of these CPOs (93%) were imposed by courts in the years 2021-22 and 2022-23.

Of the 11,089 CPOs with unpaid work requirements, the progression of the unpaid work requirement as of 31 March 2023 was:

• 17% (1,842) had successfully completed
• 1% (151) had terminated unsuccessfully
• 82% (9,096) were being progressed.

(Please note that some of these CPOs have other requirements being progressed at the same time and may be completed after the unpaid work requirement.

Justice Social Work Statistics show that, for CPOs in general, the time taken from imposition to completion/termination increased over the pandemic years 2020-21 and 2021-22. The longer period taken to complete unpaid work in recent years is to be expected, given that the Coronavirus (Scotland) Act 2020 extended time limits for completion of existing unpaid work requirements in CPOs by 12 months, and required any new requirements made to be given at least 12 months to complete. This came into effect on 7 April 2020 and applied to orders imposed before the end of September 2022.

CPOs tend to have more than one requirement. The average number of requirements per CPO in 2022-23 was 1.6. In 2022-23, there were 10,024 CPOs imposed with an unpaid work requirement. Over half of these had a supervision requirement as well.

Figures 1 and 2 illustrate how unpaid work requirements have continually been progressed by justice social work over the last seven years. A CPO is considered finished if it is completed successfully or terminated by a court.

Figure 1 shows when the CPO was finished (i.e. all the requirements were completed or terminated, not just the unpaid work requirement). Figure 2 looks at the data again but is based on the date on which the unpaid work hours were finished (i.e. when the unpaid requirement was completed or terminated). The percentages in Figure 1 tend to be smaller than Figure 2 for the first and second years of progressing the CPOs. This results from some orders having other requirements in addition to unpaid work. For example, supervision could be scheduled to run longer than the unpaid work requirement.

Figure 1: The change in finishing rates caused by the pandemic on community payback orders.

Percentage of unpaid work requirements from year imposed to the year of completion/termination of the community payback order

Scotland, 2016-17 to 2022-23

The row headings refer to the year imposed while the column headings refer to the year completed/terminated.

Notes:

z = data for a category that does not apply

Calculated as row percentages. Data is rounded.

Figure 1 shows the rate of progression between the year the CPO is imposed and the year it was completed. For instance, those CPOs imposed in 2016-17, 35% were completed in the same year (2016-17), 51% in the following year (2017-18), 12% in 2018-19 and 2% in 2019-20.

In Figure 1, there is a marked change in percentages of CPOs imposed and completed in the same year after the first national lockdown in March 2020. This can be seen from 2020-21 onwards, as the percentages drop from over 30% to 11%. This increased to 19% in 2022-23 but this was still lower than pre-pandemic years.

Figure 2 shows the progression of the unpaid work requirement only. It is a subset of Figure 1, and this is why the percentages of ‘ being progressed’ are smaller.

Figure 2 : The change in finishing rates caused by the pandemic on unpaid work requirements only.

Percentage of unpaid work requirements from year imposed to the year of completion/termination of the unpaid work requirement

Scotland, 2016-17 to 2022-23

The row headings refer to the year imposed while the column headings refer to the year completed/terminated

Notes:

z = data for a category that does not apply.

Calculated as row percentages. Data is rounded.

A small number of unknowns are included in the percentage being progressed.

There was a consistent pattern for unpaid work requirements imposed in pre-pandemic years of 2016-17 to 2018-19. Generally:

• Just over 40% of unpaid work requirements were finished in the same financial year in which they were imposed.
• Just under half finished in the following year.
• The percentage of unpaid work hours completed or terminated by the end of the following year after the year of imposition was around 92%.
• Around 5 to 7 per cent finished in the second year after the year of imposition.

Data for 2019-20 is different. As the first national lockdown occurred in the last month of 2019-20 (i.e. March 2020), it had over 40% being finished in the same year as imposition, this is like previous years. If the pattern were to continue, those finishing in the following year should have been almost 50% but it had reduced to 31% as the pandemic continued. Pre-pandemic over 90% of unpaid work requirements were completed by the following year of imposition. For those imposed in 2019-20 and completed by the end of 2020-21, this rate reduced to 71%.

For the years 2020-21 to 2022-23, the patterns changed:

• Unpaid work requirements which finished in the same financial year in which they were imposed ranged from 15% to 29% over the three years. (Pre-pandemic this was over 40%.)
• There was increase in those that finished in the year after imposition to between 57% and 62%. This was due to the decrease of those finishing in the same year of imposition.
• The percentage of unpaid work hours completed or terminated by the end of the following year after the year of imposition was 77% for those imposed in 2020-21 and 83% for those imposed in 2021-22. This was lower than pre-pandemic years which was over 90%.

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic reduced the rate of progressing unpaid work requirements. There has been an increase since 2020-21, but it is still below pre-pandemic levels. There were 9,096 CPOs with unpaid work requirements being progressed at the start of the financial year 2023-2024.