Deferred Prosecution: What Outcomes 23 and 24 Actually Do

⚠ For PSR training, not legal advice. This article is for educational purposes and is general information only, not legal advice. AccrediLaw provides training; we do not provide legal advice.

In April 2026 the Home Office added two outcome codes to the framework: Outcome 23, child deferred prosecution, and Outcome 24, adult deferred prosecution.

If you have read about them anywhere, you have probably read that they carved deferred prosecution out of Outcome 22. That is the standard description and it is wrong. Outcome 22 survives intact, with its own full section and its own checklist. Codes 23 and 24 were added alongside it.

The distinction that does matter is evidential, and getting it right decides which disposal you ask for.

What the Two New Codes Actually Do

A deferred prosecution puts a charging decision on hold. In the Home Office guidance, “the decision to prosecute is put on hold, whilst the offender completes the agreed diversionary conditions”. If they comply, the outcome is recorded as 23 or 24. If they do not, “the prosecution decision is upheld”.

Both codes carry a threshold Outcome 22 does not:

Whilst the offender does not need to accept responsibility for the crime, there must be sufficient evidence to charge in line with charging standards.

Outcome 22 has no evidential requirement at all. So the practical rule is simple. A completed diversion with no prosecution decision pending stays Outcome 22. A live prosecution decision parked while your client completes conditions is 23 or 24.

Choosing between 23 and 24 is only about age. Code 23 is for a child, code 24 for an adult, and their operative wording is otherwise identical. Code 23 carries two extra checklist requirements, both about child knife possession, which we come to below.

The Trap in the Name

These are not Deferred Prosecution Agreements, and they cannot be.

A DPA under Schedule 17 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 is a creature of corporate crime. Paragraph 4(1) says the party to a DPA “may be a body corporate, a partnership or an unincorporated association, but may not be an individual”.

Your client cannot have a DPA. What they can have is an administrative outcome code with no statutory footing whatsoever. The name invites the wrong inference, and it is the sort of error that is expensive to make out loud in a custody suite.

No Admission, but Not No Case to Answer

All three of Outcome 22, 23 and 24 can be given without your client admitting the offence. That is the feature that makes this family of disposals worth knowing, and we have written about it separately in the context of Outcome 22.

But do not let “no admission required” slide into “no case to answer”. For codes 23 and 24 the evidence must already be sufficient to charge. Your client is not admitting anything, and the police are simultaneously satisfied they could prosecute. Those two things sit together uncomfortably, and a client should understand both before agreeing to conditions.

Where They Came From, and What Was Left Undone

The lineage runs from the Lammy Review in 2017, which recommended expanding deferred prosecution, to Outcome 22 in April 2019, to the joint inspection by HM Inspectorate of Probation and HMICFRS in October 2025, which recommended that the Home Office

amend crime outcome types to clearly distinguish between Outcome 22 (no further action), deferred youth cautions, and deferred prosecutions.

April 2026 delivered half of that. The split that arrived divides by age, not by caution against prosecution. Deferred cautions still have no code of their own and are still recorded as Outcome 22, alongside genuine no-further-action cases. So the confusion the inspectorate identified has been reduced, not removed.

That matters at the station. When a force tells you it is offering “an Outcome 22”, ask which kind. A deferred youth caution recorded as Outcome 22 requires an admission. A plain Outcome 22 does not.

Child Knife Possession: The Practical Hook

If you act for children, this is the part to know.

Government guidance published in February 2026 changed the baseline. Before it, whether a force offered deferred prosecution at all was purely a local decision. Now:

The Government expects all police forces to ensure Deferred Prosecution is available as an option to respond to select child knife possession offences.

Read that carefully. It is an expectation, not a duty, and the guidance concedes as much: “While not a statutory duty”. But it is a material shift, and a representative can hold a force to a published government expectation in a way they could not hold it to a local preference.

The reasoning is the quotable part, because it is an argument you can borrow:

The government does not consider Child Cautions to be appropriate for knife possession offences as they do not guarantee an intervention will be provided.

Community resolution is ruled out entirely for knife possession. And where Outcome 23 is used, the guidance requires that the intervention “should be carried out by the Youth Justice Service and not the police force”, which is worth checking, because inspectors have found forces running their own workbook interventions with staff who were not trained to deliver them.

Two limits to have ready before you overreach. The guidance says deferred prosecution “should not replace charging or the use of Youth Conditional Cautions”, and that a child “should generally not receive more than one Deferred Prosecution for a knife possession offence”. For repeat possession, “a charge will likely be the most appropriate response”. HMICFRS has separately cautioned that this family of disposals “should not be liberally applied to knife crime”.

The Conditions Have No Ceiling

Here is something the guidance does not tell you, and it is a gap rather than an oversight.

April 2026 defined the code. It did not define the scheme. The October 2025 inspection found “there was no national guidance about how deferred caution or deferred prosecution schemes should operate”, and April 2026 did not fix that.

So conditions, duration and review are whatever the local scheme says. In practice, published schemes have run at four months for adults and a standardised twelve weeks for children with six-weekly reviews. Compare that with a Youth Conditional Caution, where conditions “should be achievable within 16 weeks”, or with the statutory diversionary caution Parliament drafted but never brought into force, which caps unpaid work at 20 hours.

Deferred prosecution has no statutory ceiling on duration, on hours, or on what can be asked. There is no mandatory duty to consult the victim, no statutory decision-maker, and no arrest power for breach. Parliament wrote all of those safeguards into the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and has never commenced them. The consultation on the code of practice closed in October 2023 and the page still says the responses are being analysed.

Deferred prosecution does the same job with none of that apparatus. That is why it exists: it needed no commencement order and no code laid before Parliament.

The Six Month Trap

This is the most practically dangerous thing about a deferred prosecution and almost nobody raises it.

No custody time limit runs, because your client was never charged. The clock that actually bites is section 127(1) of the Magistrates’ Courts Act 1980: a magistrates’ court cannot try an information unless it was laid within six months of the offence.

A twelve-week to four-month deferral on a summary-only matter can run most of that period. If your client then fails to comply, the prosecution the police intended to revive may be close to unavailable, or the pressure to charge quickly may work against a fair review. This is not speculation. The panel chair in one evaluated scheme said in terms that “lengthy delays could have an impact on any prosecution by the court”.

Section 39A of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 relieves this for domestic-abuse-related common assault, giving six months from a statement with a two year long stop. It does not help elsewhere.

Raise the time limit before your client agrees to a long deferral on a summary-only offence.

What Happens If They Do Not Comply

Failure does not automatically produce a charge. The guidance says “the appropriate authority should be sought to authorise the charge”, and the inspection describes prosecution as something that “can” resume. So there is a decision to be made, and a decision is something you can make representations about.

But be clear with your client about two things.

There is no appeal. No source describes a formal review, a right to make representations at the breach stage, or any appeal against a decision to revive the prosecution. That is a genuine absence, not a gap in our reading.

And there is no soft landing. An Outcome 22 that fails has somewhere to go: where there is no evidence or admission, the case can be closed under Outcomes 15 or 16. Codes 23 and 24 have no such fallback, because sufficiency of evidence was the entry condition. Failing a deferred prosecution is materially more dangerous for your client than failing an Outcome 22.

Two Safeguards That Are Missing

Both of these are visible in the guidance itself, and both favour raising them early.

The domestic abuse safeguard does not carry across. Outcome 22 requires that an inspector authorise the outcome in domestic abuse cases. Codes 23 and 24 carry no rank requirement and no domestic abuse carve-out at all.

Nobody is required to warn your client about disclosure. The guidance rule requiring the suspect to be told they will be recorded as responsible applies to “outcome types 1-4 and 6-10, 21 and 22 inclusive”. Codes 23 and 24 are not in that list. The whole Outcome 22, 23 and 24 section contains no mention of the Disclosure and Barring Service, yet these codes record a person as having been dealt with for an offence for which there was evidence sufficient to charge.

If nobody else explains the disclosure position to your client, that job is yours.

Whether It Is Available Where You Practise

Deferred prosecution is not evenly distributed and never has been. In July 2025 the Leveson review recorded fourteen forces operating a scheme, with one more implementing. The October 2025 inspection found only three of six inspected forces ran one, and “none were able to provide us with detailed policies and agreements about how the schemes worked”.

The Youth Justice Board’s first release on diversionary outcomes, published in June 2026, gives the clearest picture available. Of 13,525 diversionary outcomes for children with youth justice service involvement in the year to December 2025, 4,894, or 36 per cent, were recorded as deferred prosecution or deferred caution. Regionally that ran from 56 per cent in the North East and 54 per cent in Wales down to 3 per cent in London. Northumbria recorded 483. Bedfordshire, Dorset and Northamptonshire recorded none at all.

Treat those figures carefully. They combine deferred prosecutions with deferred cautions, they cover children only, and they cover only cases with youth justice service involvement. They are an upper bound on what Outcome 23 will look like and they say nothing about Outcome 24.

No usage data for codes 23 and 24 themselves exists yet. The first is expected in October 2026, and early figures will be unreliable because at least one widely used youth case management system cannot record Outcome 23 natively until 2027 or 2028 and maps it to an older disposal in the meantime.

The Honest Position

Deferred prosecution asks your client to complete conditions, without admitting anything, in circumstances where the police say they already have enough to charge. In exchange, no caution and no conviction.

For the right case that is a good trade, and for a child facing a first knife possession it may be the best outcome realistically available. But it is a trade, the conditions have no statutory ceiling, the safeguards that apply to Outcome 22 do not all carry across, and the clock keeps running.

Know which of 22, 23 and 24 is actually on the table before you advise. They are not interchangeable.