Justice Social Work Statistics in Scotland: 2023-24 – Part 1

6 Bail supervision

(Classified in 2022-23 and 2023-24 as statistics in development - Tables 1 & 6)

Key statistics for 2023-24:

• A total of 1,300 bail supervision cases commenced in 2023-24, a rise of 17 per cent from 1,100 in 2022-23. This was the highest in the last ten years.
• Around 80 per cent of supervised bail was for males.
• There were 5,500 assessment reports for bail suitability submitted to the courts, a rise of 22 per cent from 4,500 in 2022-23.

Bail supervision is a social work or third sector service that supports people to comply with the conditions of their bail. It is intended to provide a robust and credible alternative to remand in custody, whereby people accused or convicted of an offence (or offences) are assessed as requiring a level of supervision, monitoring and support to adhere to bail conditions. Bail with electronic monitoring (EM) is also available to the court. Bail supervision and bail with EM can be imposed either separately or together.

The Scottish Government increased the volume of information it requested on bail from local authorities in 2022-23. Any collection of new data needs time to standardise and new data tends not to be as consistent as data which has been collected over a longer period of time. As a result, the statistics for bail supervision are still classified as “official statistics in development” whereas the rest of the information in this publication and accompanying tables is classified as “accredited official statistics”.

The 2023-24 data has seen improvements in reporting as more local authorities were able to provide the breakdown for assessment reports by recommendation. The Scottish Government is continuing to work on improving the data collection guidance to support local authorities.

A total of 1,300 bail supervision cases commenced in 2023-24, a rise of 17 per cent on the level of 1,100 in 2022-23 and the highest in the last ten years. Apart from in 2020-21, when many courts were closed for long periods due to the COVID-19 pandemic, numbers have risen every year since 2018-19. In 2023-24, around 250 bail supervision cases (19 per cent) involved an electronic monitoring order. This was almost double the number in 2022-23, when the data was first collected, and when only 11 per cent of cases involved electronic monitoring.

There were 5,500 assessment reports submitted to the courts in 2023-24 to assess suitability for bail supervision and electronically monitored bail. While most local authorities were able to supply breakdowns by recommendation, some were not. As a result, this breakdown was available for around 75 per cent of these reports. Of the 4,200 reports where the breakdown could be supplied, 60 per cent were assessed as suitable for supervision. This consisted of 34 per cent suitable for supervision only and 27 per cent for supervision and an electronic monitoring order. A further 17 per cent were considered suitable for bail with an electronic monitoring order only, with the remaining 23 per cent assessed as not suitable for bail supervision or electronically monitored bail.

For supervised bail cases successfully completed, these figures may include cases which commenced in a previous year. For example, a supervised case which commenced on 17 February 2023 and which completed successfully on 20 April 2023 would be recorded as a case commenced in year 2022-23 and a case successfully completed in 2023-24. This creates a limitation in reporting as it is not possible to calculate the percentage of cases successfully completed from the data collected. There are similar issues with breaches reported in 2023-24 for cases commenced in 2022-23.

In 2023-24, there were 830 bail supervision cases completed successfully and 120 bail supervision breach reports submitted.