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Annex C - Revisions to Data

Recording delays

C1. Because of the recording delays described in paragraph B1 of Annex B, figures for 2007/08, and (albeit to a much lesser extent) earlier years, should be considered provisional on the basis that future bulletins may be able to provide more up to date figures. We estimate that the 2006/07 bulletin contained a small undercount of around 400 persons with a charge proved in 2006/07, around 0.3 per cent of all persons with a charge proved. Since the last bulletin in this series was published, High Court cases which were entered too late on to the Criminal History System to be included in the data analysis files covering the years 2005 and 2006 and the first three months of 2007 have now been added to the Scottish Government court proceedings database.

C2. The data collected are subject to the errors which may arise in any large scale recording system. While some inconsistencies in the data received cannot currently be corrected, every effort has been made to clean up records for which key information is missing, such as the age and/or sex of the person or the type of court where they were proceeded against. This cleaning has been done by checking case extract information provided to the Scottish Government by the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service ( COPFS). In addition, dates of birth which suggest a person being proceeded against is very young have also been checked against information held by COPFS and, where appropriate, amended.

Reporting on breach of social work orders

C3. There has been an amendment to all of Tables 1 to 12 in this year's bulletin compared with previous years, with persons having a charge proved for breach of a social work order excluded from the totals. The court proceedings figures for 2007/08 show that the number of persons with a charge proved for breaching a social work order fell by 39 per cent, compared with the previous year, from 4,900 to 3,000 (bottom of Table 4A). However, the sharp fall in numbers over this period is believed to be more due to a change in recording practices as opposed to a true fall in the actual numbers. In 2006/07 and previous years, a breach of social work order had, by necessity, been recorded as a crime on its own, with no link to the previous crime which led to the imposition of the order in the first place. This was because it was not operationally possible for cases to be re-opened if a breach of the original community sentence occurred. However, since the introduction of new IT systems within the courts, this has been rectified with any breaches being recorded within the original case when these happen. Therefore, as it is generally only the initial outcome which is included in the court proceedings statistics (see note D2 in Annex D), the change in recording practice is leading to fewer persons being identified as having a main crime category of "breach of a social work order". We also suspect that it may historically have been the case that someone who breaches a social work order by committing a crime, is having both the crime and the breach of the order recorded as separate crimes, thereby introducing an element of double counting. As the Criminal History System was not set up with the intention of being a statistical tool, there are significant limitations on the amount of analysis which can be done to check this. Some limited analysis to date of the raw data has shown that in the vast majority of cases, in both 2006/07 and 2007/08, where there has been a breach of a social work order, no other crime is recorded under that case. The limitations of the data mean it is not possible to check whether there is another crime which has been recorded under a different case number or whether the breach was not in fact as a result of criminal activity but was due to a material breach such as, for example, failing to report a change of address.

C4. Our belief that the apparent fall in the number of persons with a charge proved for breaching a social work order is due to the recording issue described in C3 earlier, is given weight by the figures in our Criminal Justice Social Work Statistics bulletin ( http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2008/12/09091001/0). This shows that the combined number of breaches of probation orders and community service orders remained at around the same level in 2007/08 as in 2006/07.

C5. Almost all of the people with a charge proved for a breach of social work order had the charge proved in a sheriff court (ranging from 92 per cent in 1998/99 to 99 per cent in both 2006/07 and 2007/08). Table C shows the breakdown by main penalty of all with a charge proved for a breach in the last five years by the main penalties involved. It can be seen that these proportions have not been affected by the reduction in numbers between 2006/07 and 2007/08.

Table C : Proportion of persons with a charge proved for breach of social work orders, 2003/04 to 2007/08 by main penalty imposed

Reporting on bail orders

C6. The figures published in this bulletin for total bail orders issued by Scottish courts (in Tables 15, 16 and 17) for the years back to 2002/03 are calculated on a different basis from those published in previous versions of this bulletin. The totals in Tables 15 to 17 are based on the data sent to the Scottish Government by SPSA, but exclude any modifications to existing bail orders and, in addition, where there is more than one bail order for the same person on the same day, only one of those is counted. Previous calculations of bail order numbers have involved the use of a randomly generated court appearance number in identifying which records should be counted in order to exclude modifications and duplicate records. After consultation with the data provider SPSA, we have decided that the police case reference number is a more appropriate identifier to use. This has resulted in the figures from 2002/03 to 2006/07 in this bulletin being around 1 to 2 per cent lower than the previously published figures.

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