User Guide to Recorded Crime Statistics in Scotland

20. Revisions policy

Amendments to crime and offence records will always arise after data has been submitted by Police Scotland to the Scottish Government. Some crime or offence records may, on further investigation by the police, be re-designated to not constitute a crime or offence (see the No Crime Records chapter). In other cases the original crime or offence may be re-classified, which could shift the record between different crime or offence groups.

These amendments to crime and offence records, which arise after data has been submitted by Police Scotland to the Scottish Government, are not included in subsequent Recorded Crime in Scotland bulletin series. No revisions to previously published data are made. However, any discrepancies or errors that are discovered in the recorded crime data will always be corrected.

Each submission of data to the Scottish Government contains revisions back to quarter 1 of the 2013-14 reporting year, reflecting the amendments described above. To assess the extent of these amendments, we have compared the crime and offence data published for 2022-23 (which was submitted to the Scottish Government in April 2023 with what was reported for the same period one year later (April 2024). Table 20.1 shows the results of this exercise.

As with our analysis in previous bulletins, the comparison presented below confirms that the extent of further amendment to police crime and offence records following the original submission of data continues to be minimal at the Scotland level. This gives users confidence that the published statistics for 2014-15 to 2022-23 recorded crimes and offences are reliable. On a proportional basis, the biggest impact is on the Crimes of dishonesty group, where a net 1,087 fewer crimes have been recorded following no-criming and reclassification between groups. This has reduced the number of Crimes of Dishonesty by 1.1% from 103,393 to 102,306.

We repeat this exercise annually, as a quality assurance exercise, to confirm that further amendments remain minimal. Despite the fact only a very small proportion of records are amended following their original submission to the Scottish Government, it is important for Accredited Official Statistics purposes that time series are on a like-for-like basis. As such, the previous years data used in the current bulletin remains that which was submitted originally, to ensure this is consistent with the timetable followed for the submission of data each year (i.e. the same amount of time has elapsed for amendments to records for each reporting year).

This analysis demonstrates that a more up-to-date set of figures are available from Police Scotland than included in this Accredited Official Statistics publication. Given this the Scottish Crime Recording Board (SCRB) was asked to assess whether any amendment to our revisions policy should be made before the 2015-16 publication. In light of the minimal level of change following the original submission of data, the SCRB concluded in December 2015 that no changes were necessary to our revisions policy as our current approach was simple to understand and kept open the possibility of future publications coming out earlier in the year. As such, the existing revisions policy and practice will continue to be followed until such time as users request any reconsideration.