Examining the use of Out of Court Disposals for adults with health vulnerabilities

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What is the issue?

Out of Court Disposals (OOCDs) are used by police in England and Wales as an alternative to prosecution. They are a means of rapidly resolving investigations into low-level crimes and anti-social behaviour in a way that prevents escalation to more serious crimes and reduces reoffending. Importantly, OOCDs with conditions attached can be used by police to address any needs vulnerable offenders may have, such as mental health issues or substance abuse problems.

Following legislative reforms, a new framework will soon come into force nationally. This new framework consolidates the current disposals into two primary options: Diversionary Caution and Community Caution. A comprehensive picture of the current use of different disposals is needed to assess what changes are still required across England and Wales, to ensure that forces will be ready to comply with the new legislation when it comes into force.

How did we help?

RAND Europe, in partnership with Get the Data and Skills for Justice, was commissioned by the Ministry of Justice to conduct a study on how police in England and Wales use Out of Court Disposals (OOCDs) to support adults with health-related vulnerabilities.

The goals of the study were to:

Give a better understanding of the current scale and use of OOCDs with relevant conditions for adults with mental health and other health vulnerabilities.
Identify relevant intervention services currently used by police forces as OOCD conditions for adults with health vulnerabilities.
Identify gaps in local intervention services.
Enable evidence-informed decision making by sharing findings on approaches to identify health vulnerabilities and deploy health-related OOCD conditions.
Provide guidance for police forces on effective practice for accessing existing services.
Enable police to improve data capture for this group of offenders, including on specific conditions attached to OOCDs.

What did we find?

Overall, there is significant variation across forces in England and Wales in their OOCD processes and in how well-developed and well-established these processes are.

At the force level, it appeared that OOCDs were underused in many forces; across the 31 forces that shared information on outcomes given to offenders in 2021, on average only 8 per cent of all offenders were given an OOCD, but this varied substantially between forces. Furthermore, significant gaps were identified across most force areas in the availability of interventions to meet the needs of vulnerable offenders. Furthermore, limited provision of training on OOCD use, staff turnover, high proportions of inexperienced officers, and the disproportionality in who receives OOCDs were identified as significant force-level challenges to making the best use of OOCDs to support adults with health vulnerabilities.

At the frontline operational level, limited use of vulnerability assessments in the OOCD process and limited input from Liaison and Diversion (L&D) services were also widely reported. In relation to offender engagement and compliance with conditions, there is a lack of meaningful data available which creates challenges in understanding the effectiveness of their use. Overall, the existence of a dedicated OOCD team or independent entity was associated with strong and consistently applied OOCD processes.

While most interventions identified in this study have not been rigorously evaluated, broader evidence from the UK and abroad suggests that OOCDs can address health vulnerabilities and reduce reoffending. In the resulting report, researchers discuss how relevant data can be collated to facilitate the management, monitoring, and evaluation of OOCDs.

Based on these reflections, we produced a series of practice guides and tools to support forces to develop and maintain good practice in using OOCDs to support adults with health vulnerabilities.

What can be done?

The study put forward a series of implications for these findings.

At the force level, these implications are:

Each force should review their current processes and protocols to ensure significant opportunities to use OOCDs for those with health vulnerabilities are not being missed. A guide developed as part of this study is available below.
Forces should analyse data on local needs to identify any gaps in service provision, and work with service providers to address these gaps.
Forces should establish consistent and standardised modes of communication with service providers, including on compliance with and breaches of conditions.
Each force should review its current use of OOCD attached services aimed at those with health vulnerabilities to ensure that their current practice is not resulting in disproportionality in the use of OOCDs or discriminating against some individuals, groups or communities.

At the frontline operational level, these implications are:

Each force (where not already in place) should review its position on having a dedicated OOCD team and develop options to put one in place.
Each force should review their current approach to screening for and assessing health vulnerabilities as part of the OOCD decision making process including links to L&D or equivalent services in all relevant settings, including for Voluntary Attendance. The research team has developed a guide on working with L&D for OOCDs.
Where possible, services attached as a condition should be appropriate for and ideally tailored to the offenders’ needs and should be feasible as a condition – for example, the service is accessible, available without cost to the offender, and can be utilised within the timescales of the OOCD.
Compliance with conditions should be defined consistently across all OOCD stakeholders in each force area, and relevant data should be monitored consistently and used to better understand the effectiveness of the conditions.
In dealing with breaches of conditions, good practice may include making case-by-case decisions on the most appropriate next step, informed by an understanding of the offender’s issues with complying.

In relation to OOCD data collection and evaluation, implications are:

Forces should collect the OOCD minimum dataset to manage cases, monitor delivery and evaluate impact.
Forces should use or copy the demonstration tool within their own systems to collect the right data and report analyses to various audiences – the OOCD team, frontline officers, senior leadership, victims and offenders.
Forces should set up a "virtuous cycle" of data collection and communication, where the results of OOCDs are communicated to frontline officers routinely to demonstrate their value and improve officers' data supply.