Crown Prosecution Service: Conditional Cautions Administered in England and Wales

Conditional Cautioning was introduced by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and is operated under a statutory Code of Practice. The data provides information from the CPS case management system about Conditional Cautions administered, which are out-of-court disposals for offenders aged 18 or over who admit an offence. The dataset is published by the Ministry of Justice under the OGL-UK-3.0 license and was last updated on 2026-07-08.

Use Cases

• Analyzing trends in the use of Conditional Cautions based on the types of offences listed in the DPP's Guidance.
• Evaluating the effectiveness of reparative, rehabilitative, and restrictive conditions mentioned in the description.
• Studying the transparency and monitoring of out-of-court disposals as referenced in the CPS commitment.
• Modeling the public interest test for diverting offenders from the court process based on case characteristics.

Strengths

• Data is sourced directly from the CPS case management system, as stated in the description.
• The legal framework is clearly defined, referencing the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and a statutory Code of Practice.
• The dataset is published under the OGL-UK-3.0 license, facilitating open use.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The description does not specify a temporal coverage range for the data.

Provenance

Source

Ministry of Justice

Collection Method

Extracted from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) case management system.

Time Range

null

Freshness

Last updated 2026-07-08 13:32:00.063915; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Likely covers England and Wales, as the CPS operates there.