Transparency data

Unpaid Work Management Information Release - Guidance

Published 31 October 2024

Applies to England and Wales

1. Introduction

This document supplements the biannual Unpaid Work Management Information release by providing a guide to the data. This document focuses on the definitions and counting procedures used to create these data.

Unpaid work, also known as community payback (or colloquially as community service) is one of the options available to sentencers at court. Individuals can be sentenced to undertake between 40 hours and 300 hours of unpaid work which should be completed in 12 months from sentencing.

The main purpose of unpaid work is to provide punishment and reparation, with individuals carrying out work on projects which benefit their local communities. Individuals are eligible to complete Education, Training and Employment (ETE) programmes as part of their unpaid work requirement, with up to 30% of their hours potentially available to complete the rehabilitative activities.

Data presented in this release commences from April 2022. Data prior to this are affected by the following factors:

• From June 2014 to June 2021, Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs) managed medium and low-risk offenders which included the majority of unpaid work cases.
• From July 2021 onward, probation has been unified, resulting in unpaid work being managed by the Probation Service.
• In the years 2019/20 and 2020/21, unpaid work delivery was affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with projects and organisations that provided placements being closed, along with the social distancing rules making it difficult for delivery to continue as normal.

This management information release follows the inter-related Offender Management Statistics Quarterly bulletin which provides quarterly statistics on offenders under probation supervision. To note, the Offender Management Statistics Quarterly bulletin focuses on community orders and suspended sentence orders, whereas this management information release considers all order types where unpaid work could be included as a requirement.

2. Main definitions

2.1 Regions

The Probation Service is responsible for managing all offenders on a community sentence or licence following their release from prison in England and Wales. There are 12 probation regions – 11 in England and one in Wales. The data in the tables are shown at both the regional level and national level.

Where data could not be assigned to a region (for example, due to recording errors), the results have been grouped in the ‘Other’ category for completeness.

2.2 Court orders

The term court orders used in this release applies to all court orders where unpaid work can be added which are:

• community orders
• suspended sentence orders
• youth rehabilitation orders
• enforcement orders
• supervision default orders
• orders made in other UK jurisdictions where the case has transferred

2.3 Orders sentenced with unpaid work

Any court order sentenced in the time period, where the sentence includes an unpaid work requirement.

2.4 Unpaid work requirements

Courts can sentence an individual to undertake between 40 hours and 300 hours of unpaid work as a requirement on an order. This is added to the order as a ‘regular’ unpaid work requirement.

In cases where the court order is made more onerous due to breach, an additional unpaid work requirement may be added to the order.

Exclusions: unpaid work requirements which are to be served consecutively or concurrently are excluded from this management information release, though any hours completed on these requirements will be counted.

2.5 Sentences (Starts)

Where the person has been sentenced to an order with a regular unpaid work requirement, the start date is usually the sentence date.

Additional unpaid work requirements can be added to an order after it has started (for example, if the order is breached, the court may decide to add additional unpaid work hours); in these cases, the start date is the date the additional requirement was added.

2.6 Sessions

Each unpaid work session arranged for the individual. Sessions include the initial induction appointment and any education, training and employment sessions which are applicable to the unpaid work requirement.

2.7 Offered

The Probation Service will notify the person in advance about the unpaid work sessions which have been arranged for them. To ensure that persons are given sufficient notice of sessions, these are often arranged in bulk and well in advance of the session taking place. Due to this, some sessions may be cancelled or rescheduled to a later date.

2.8 Attended (Credited)

Where a person attends their unpaid work session, the time they spend working will be credited towards the number of hours they have been ordered to complete. This includes where a person attends a session and subsequently fails to comply with instructions or is sent home due to poor behaviour, or where service issues during the day cause a session to be cancelled.

2.9 Terminations

In the context of this release, a termination is recorded where a person, order or unpaid work requirement has ended, and there is no more active involvement. This can be for any of the following reasons:

• completion of the order or requirement
• revocation of the order or requirement (for example, due to ill-health, change in circumstance or commission of a further offence)
• expiry of an order
• activation of a suspended sentence order
• death
• deportation
• transfer to outside of England and Wales.

2.10 Rapid Deployment Project – Clean Streets

Through Rapid Deployment Projects, Probation Community Payback teams work in partnership with local authorities to rapidly clean up instances of antisocial behaviour. The work includes clearance of fly tipping sites, litter picking and graffiti removal within 48 hours of notification.

Since its launch in 2023, the Rapid Deployment Project has been rolled out in eight probation regions, with the remaining four regions expected to commence across the remainder of 2024.

3. Counting procedures

To protect the disclosure of personal information of any individual, reported figures are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 for presentation in this document.

Total figures are also subject to this suppression methodology after calculation, so the sum of numbers in each column may not match the total shown.

3.1 Individuals

In the tables showing the number of individuals, the data count each person only once in each quarter (for example, if a person received more than one order with unpaid work in the quarter, they would only be counted once). If during the same quarter, a person received multiple orders with unpaid work in different regions (for example, if the person moved), they would count once in each region, but once in the overall England and Wales aggregation.

3.2 Start dates

The data count each individual, order, or unpaid work requirement starting in the quarter. For individuals and orders, the count uses the order start date to determine the cases; for unpaid work requirements, the requirement start date is used.

3.3 Caseload

The data count each individual, order, or unpaid work requirement active on the last day of the quarter.

3.4 Terminations

The data count each individual, order, or unpaid work requirement terminating in the quarter. For individuals and orders, the count uses the order termination date to determine the cases; for unpaid work requirements, the requirement termination date is used.

3.5 Sessions

The data count each session for each person in the quarter. Where the work has been completed as part of a group project, each person participating in the group will get a unique session and as a result, the project will count multiple times in the sessions data.

3.6 Hours

The data count the total sum of hours offered to all individuals with an unpaid work requirement in the quarter. Where the work has been completed, the number of hours spent working are credited as a total sum in the quarter in which the work was delivered (see definitions for Offered and Attended above).

Following the unification of the Probation Service in 2021, the method of recording of unpaid work hours varied across probation regions, with some regions including hours for travel against work delivered. Data handling practices may be revaluated in future management information releases to align data recording throughout the probation regions in England and Wales.

4. Data sources and quality

Data in this release are drawn from administrative IT systems; namely National Delius (nDelius), the current probation case management system. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the information collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system due to possible errors with data entry and processing. The figures shown have been checked as far as practical and have rounded to the nearest multiple of 5, to manage the quality of the data.

Appropriate data sources were used for these data, identified through engagement with probation staff and colleagues in His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) HQ. This release is published for transparency and represents the Ministry of Justice’s ambition to work in partnership with local authorities. The Probation Service are responsible for ensuring the accuracy of their data. These data are management information and are subject to potential revision in future releases.

To improve the integrity of data used, a lag of three months has been applied to allow staff sufficient time to update and assure the data.

5. Further information

As well as this bulletin, the following products are published as part of this release:

• Unpaid Work Management Information Release – Summary
• Unpaid Work Management Information Release – Data Tables
• Unpaid Work Management Information Release – Project Clean Streets Data Tables

View more information in our Biannual Unpaid Work Management Information collection page.

6. Contact

Press enquiries should be directed to the Ministry of Justice press office:
Tel: 020 3334 3536
Email: newsdesk@justice.gsi.gov.uk

Other enquiries about these management information should be directed to:

E Stradling
HMPPS Performance Unit
Ministry of Justice
102 Petty France
London
SW1H 9AJ
Email: CrossCuttingPerformanceEnquiries@justice.gov.uk