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Research Article

Community Orders

Dr Eoin Guilfoyle

October 2025

Read the full report on the Sentencing Hub: Community Orders: A Review of Recent Research and Developments

Executive Summary:

  • The Community Order (CO) is one of the non-custodial sentencing options available to magistrates and judges in England and Wales. It allows magistrates and judges to choose between a wide range of requirements, combining them if needs be, when sentencing a person. The CO can fulfil any of the purposes of sentencing. It was designed to be flexible and capable of being tailored to the individual needs of the person being sentenced.
  • The use of the CO has decreased significantly in recent years. The number of COs imposed each year has more than halved (down 56%) since 2010. When considering the proportionate use of the four main sanctions for more serious offences (fines, COs, Suspended Sentence Orders and immediate custody), it is COs that have experienced, by far, the greatest decline.
  • Research has identified a range of potential issues and problems with the CO and how it operates and have provided some insight into why the use of the sanction is declining. These include a lack of confidence in COs amongst magistrates and judges, a decline in quality and use of pre-sentence reports, a lack of information about available services and how they operate, limited availability of some treatment requirements and issues with breach procedures.
  • The ‘Transforming Rehabilitation’ (TR) reforms introduced in 2014, which split the delivery of COs between the National Probation Service (NPS) and Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs), have also been heavily criticised in a number of reports. The public/private split was subsequently abolished in 2021 with the NPS now having responsibility for both the management of offenders and the delivery of unpaid work and accredited programmes. While reports suggest that the TR reforms may have exacerbated some of the issues and problems noted above and therefore may have contributed to the reduction in the use of the CO, it is unlikely that they are the sole cause of the decline. The decline in the use of the CO and many of the issues and problems identified predate the introduction of TR and have continued post-unification of probation services.
  • Many aspects of the CO would benefit from additional research. While this report highlights some potential causes of the reduction in its use, we still do not have a complete understanding of why the sanction is declining. Further research into the reasons behind this trend—and strategies to address it—would be valuable. Another priority is research focused on the development of alternative measures of effectiveness beyond reconviction rates, which fail to capture the full range of outcomes associated with community-based sanctions. Additional research exploring whether ethnic minority offenders face disadvantages at the risk assessment and pre-sentence report writing stages would also be useful. Finally, more work is needed to assess public knowledge of, and attitudes towards, the CO, as this may influence both its use and perceived legitimacy.

Read the full report here.