Community Payback Orders: Commenced
Community payback orders commenced in each year from 2011-12 by age group and gender.
Data
Community Payback Orders: Commenced
Description
Community payback orders (CPOs) replaced probation, community service and supervised attendance orders. They were introduced for offences committed on or after 1st February 2011. CPOs are now by far the most commonly issued social work order.
This data is derived from an annual return made to the Scottish Government by local authority social work departments and gives the number of CPOs commenced in each year from 2011-12 by age group and gender.
More data which shows the number of different social work order types (encompassing drug treatment & testing orders and fiscal work orders as well as CPOs and their predecessors) back to 2004-05 can be found in the datasets Social Work Orders Commenced and Social Work Orders Terminated on this website. Further data on CPOs at local authority level can be found on the Scottish Government website.
Metadata
| Theme | Crime and Justice |
|---|---|
| Organisation | Scottish Government |
| License | UK Open Government Licence (OGL) |
| Published | |
| Last updated | |
| Next update | 1 Jan 2026 |
| Update frequency | annual |
| Reference period | 2011 to 2024 |
| Geographic coverage | Council Areas, Country |
| Contact | justice_analysts@gov.scot |
Data quality
Completeness
This data brings together age and gender breakdowns for all years in the one place. The age groups match those which are used throughout the published criminal justice social work bulletin.
Uniqueness
Not assessed
Consistency
Community payback orders were introduced for offences committed on or after 1st February 2011. Numbers were not collected for the year 2010-11 due to the small numbers (estimated to be 300) involved. However, data collected from 2011-12 onwards were collected on a comparable basis.
Timeliness
It is always aimed to publish criminal justice social work statistics as soon as possible after the end of the financial year in question, As a large volume of data is collected at unit level for both community payback orders and drug treatment & testing order, these statistics are normally updated in January.
Validity
These statistics help provide trends related to the workload of community payback orders and the type of orders which local authorities deal with. For example, while criminal proceedings data provides details of community payback orders given by court, this only covers those given as a penalty of first disposal and not those which are given as, for example, a penalty for fine default or orders given as a result of an appeal to the original penalty.
Accuracy
These statistics are considered of good quality as they come from recording systems which local authorities use for case management and internal monitoring. The data has, in addition, been quality assured by the Scottish Government via extensive accuracy checks, including identifying any major differences between the current year and previous years.
Quality management
Extensive quality assurance is conducted to ensure the data received from local authorities is as accurate as possible. Part of this involves the data loading system putting the data through a number of checks and identifying issues with the data which local authorities then need to look at and fix. Checks are also made by the Scottish Government to ensure there is consistency across the data for different years for every individual order.
Additional details
Revisions
Data for previous years are revised annually as a result of revised information being received from local authorities. The original figures for 2020-21 for Renfrewshire were estimated but was replaced by actual data as the data has since been received. When the data was updated in January 2025, the age groups 16-17 and 18-20 were merged to become the new 16-20 age group.
Confidentiality policy
The data on Community Payback Orders Commenced does not contain any directly identifiable personal information.