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

Unpaid work hours imposed

Key Point: Unpaid work hours imposed by courts for the first nine months of the financial year 2023-24 was at least 2.2% higher than the same period in 2022-23. The approximate number of unpaid work hours imposed for the first nine months of 2023-24 was around 991,600.

The number of unpaid work hours imposed by Scottish courts feeds into the number of unpaid work hours being progressed. The previous section showed the rate of unpaid work requirements finishing. This section looks at the number of unpaid work hours entering the system.

Chart 2 below shows data from two different data sources. The first is Justice Social Work Statistics which displays the number of hours imposed per month from April 2017 to March 2023. Management information from April 2023 to December 2023, is derived from the Scottish Government Justice Analytical Services Criminal Disposals Dashboard. The information from the dashboard should be seen as providing a broadly indicative estimates rather than a precise measure of activity. To indicate the change in the chart due to the different data source, these nine bars are in a lighter patterned colour. (See Annex A for additional information on how this data is approximated, there is about 4% difference between the two data sources).

This is a graph showing the number of hours imposed. There is a sharp decline in April 2020 marking the first national lockdown.

Since 2020-21, the number of unpaid work hours imposed has been increasing. In 2022-23, there were 14,653 CPOs imposed with 1.32 million unpaid work hours. This is still lower than in 2019-20 (before the pandemic) when there were 16,816 CPOs imposed with 1.52 million hours.

Throughout the year the number of hours imposed varies month to month. From 2017-18 to 2019-20, the number of hours imposed was generally higher in May and October, with the lowest during December. This pattern was not the same from 2020-21 due to the disruption caused to the courts by the pandemic (this is shown in Chart 1).

The estimated number of hours imposed from April to December 2023 is around 991,600. This is at least 2.2% higher than this time period in 2022, when compared with accredited official statistics. The 2023 estimates are likely to increase slightly (approximately by 4%) when this data is replaced by the official statistics for 2023-24 (see Annex A).