Introduction

The community payback order (CPO) was introduced by the Criminal Justice and Licensing (Scotland) Act 2010. There are 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 imposed by the courts. During the period most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, delivering CPOs was more challenging. This was particularly true for CPOs with unpaid work requirements, as national lockdowns and other public health measures in 2020 and 2021 substantially limited the ability to carry out unpaid work.

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. 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 use statistical approximations when a local authority is unable to provide a return, often due to staff absence or transitions between information systems. In these cases, the previous return is adjusted by the same percentage change observed at the Scotland level between the two collection points.
• Local authorities have a one‑week window to submit data, so returns are taken on different days across local authorities.
• The data undergoes limited validation, so it provides an indicative estimate rather than a precise measure, and previous quarterly figures may be revised.
• 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.