The data on Community Payback Orders Commenced does not contain any directly identifiable personal information.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 around January or February.

Data for previous years are revised annually as a result of revised information being received from local authorities. The figures for 2020-21 for Renfrewshire are estimated as data has not to date been received.