Outcome 22: The Disposal Most PSRs Do Not Ask For

⚠ 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.

Most police station representatives don’t ask for Outcome 22 by name. Many don’t know they can. The result: children and adults who could have walked out of custody with no caution or conviction end up with a recorded sanction instead, because the better disposal was on the table and nobody named it.

If you do police station work, Outcome 22 is one of the most useful tools in the disposal hierarchy. It is also one of the most underused. This post explains what it is, when it fits, and how to argue for it.

What Outcome 22 Actually Is

Outcome 22 is a Home Office Counting Rules outcome code, introduced from April 2019. The official wording is:

Diversionary, educational or intervention activity, resulting from the crime report, has been undertaken and it is not in the public interest to take any further action.

It is used where the police agree that a structured intervention is the appropriate response and that no formal sanction is required. NPCC guidance (updated 2022) sets out the disposal in detail and is explicit that it is for use with both adult and youth cases.

Four Things Matter About Outcome 22

First, no criminal record results. Outcome 22 is not a caution and it is not a conviction.

Second, no admission of guilt is required. The Home Office guidance says so directly: “The offender does not have to admit to the offence and therefore differs from formal action taken or in the case of a Community Resolution where the offender accepts responsibility for the offence.” It makes the contrast with a caution itself, noting that “an admission of guilt is required to give an alternative Out of Court Disposal such as a caution”. This is a material distinction for clients whose evidential position is mixed but who would benefit from intervention.

One carve-out matters, because forces use the single Outcome 22 code for more than one disposal. Outcome 22 as a no-further-action, and Outcome 22 as a deferred prosecution, both require no admission. Outcome 22 used as a deferred youth caution does require an admission of guilt. Establish which one is actually on the table before you advise.

Third, a structured intervention has to happen for the disposal to be available, a restorative meeting, an educational session, an addiction-service referral, a domestic-abuse perpetrator programme, a brief intervention. The disposal is the recording of that activity, not an alternative to it.

Fourth, the disposal is recorded on police systems against the crime report. It does not appear on standard DBS checks. It can appear on enhanced DBS checks at the discretion of the chief officer, where the police consider the information relevant to the specific role, the same discretionary framework that applies to other non-conviction information under Part V of the Police Act 1997.

What Changed in April 2026

This post was first written before the framework moved, and the move matters. In April 2026 the Home Office added two new outcome codes: Outcome 23, child deferred prosecution, and Outcome 24, adult deferred prosecution.

They did not carve anything out of Outcome 22, which is how the change is often described. Outcome 22 survives intact with its own full section and checklist. Codes 23 and 24 were added alongside it.

One rider, because the distinction is finer than it first looks. NPCC guidance in 2022 directed that all deferred prosecution cases should be recorded as Outcome 22, so those cases were previously counted inside it. The wording of Outcome 22 was not narrowed, but a subset of what used to sit under it now has its own label. The codes did not shrink Outcome 22. They made a previously invisible group visible.

The distinction is evidential, and it decides which one you ask for. Codes 23 and 24 apply where a prosecution decision is held in abeyance while your client completes agreed conditions, and both carry a threshold Outcome 22 does not: “there must be sufficient evidence to charge in line with charging standards”. Outcome 22 has no such requirement. So a completed diversion with no prosecution decision pending stays Outcome 22. A live prosecution decision parked pending compliance is Outcome 23 for a child, Outcome 24 for an adult. Beyond age, their wording is identical.

All three still require no admission of guilt. But “no admission” is not “no case to answer” for 23 and 24, because the evidence must already be sufficient to charge.

One trap worth naming. These are not Deferred Prosecution Agreements. A DPA under Schedule 17 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 cannot apply to your client at all, because paragraph 4(1) says the party “may be a body corporate, a partnership or an unincorporated association, but may not be an individual”. Outcomes 23 and 24 have no statutory footing whatsoever. They are Counting Rules categories.

Where It Sits in the Disposal Hierarchy

The disposal options at the police station stage are graduated, from least to most serious:

• No further action (NFA) with words of advice, no intervention required, no record
• Community resolution, informal, often street-level, no record
• Outcome 22, structured intervention recorded, no caution or conviction, no admission required
• Outcomes 23 and 24, deferred prosecution for a child or an adult, no admission required but evidence sufficient to charge must exist
• Caution, Youth Caution (s.66ZA Crime and Disorder Act 1998) or adult conditional caution (s.22 Criminal Justice Act 2003); formal, on the record, admission of guilt required
• Youth Conditional Caution (s.66A and s.66B CDA 1998), formal, with conditions, admission required
• Charge, court-stage disposal

Outcome 22 sits between community resolution and the formal caution. For the right case it is the strongest disposal that does not leave a caution-or-conviction record and does not require an admission. That is its commercial value, in police-station representation terms.

When Outcome 22 Fits

Four conditions need to hold:

• The matter sits in the right band. For children the revised NPCC Child Gravity Matrix puts Outcome 22 at gravity 2 to 4 on the 1 to 5 scale. Gravity 1 is the no-further-action band, so a gravity 1 matter does not need Outcome 22 at all. For adults, a comparable matter under local force frameworks.
• A community resolution would not provide sufficient intervention. The client needs something, a restorative meeting with the complainant, a session with a treatment service, a structured educational activity, but they do not need a recorded sanction.
• There is a deliverable intervention. The Youth Offending Team has capacity (for children), or there is a local scheme (a brief-intervention provider, a restorative-justice service, an addiction service, a domestic-abuse perpetrator programme), and the intervention can be arranged.
• The public interest does not require formal sanction. This is the test in the HOCR wording itself.

Where all four hold, Outcome 22 is the right answer. It is more proportionate than a caution and more constructive than a community resolution.

Why It Is Underused

Three reasons. Custody sergeants don’t always raise it because their default routes are caution or charge, the disposals they process most often. YOT officers and L&D practitioners raise it more readily because it is the intervention-led route. But the YOT or L&D officer may not be the one in the room with the custody sergeant when the disposal decision is made.

That is where the police station representative matters. At the station, the PSR is often the only person in the conversation thinking about the full range of disposals. Custody sergeants who have not been asked for Outcome 22 in years will respect a representative who knows what it is and asks for it specifically.

The third reason is that representatives themselves may not know the disposal in detail. The framework is wide and the syllabus is heavy. Outcome 22 is the kind of disposal that sits in the long tail of options that a busy practitioner can lose track of. The fix is to know it by name, know when it fits, and ask for it.

The Misunderstanding You Are Arguing Against

There is a documented reason your request may be refused, and knowing it changes the conversation. In March 2023 HMICFRS inspected how well the police tackle serious youth violence and found this:

But officers in more than one force, including some in senior leadership roles, told us they could only use outcome 22 when the suspect had admitted the offence (as is the case for a police caution). This is incorrect. Although police must be able to show it isn’t in the public interest to prosecute, the suspect doesn’t have to accept responsibility for the offence for police to use outcome 22.

The inspectorate went further and identified who this falls on:

As a result, officers’ flawed understanding of outcome 22 may disproportionately affect young people from ethnic minority backgrounds and contribute to these young people being more likely to be prosecuted than their White counterparts.

Recommendation 3 of that report gave chief constables until 31 March 2024 to make sure officers were trained in the use of Outcome 22. A joint inspection by HM Inspectorate of Probation and HMICFRS in October 2025 found the confusion still present.

So a representative who points out that no admission is required is not being pedantic and is not chancing it. They are correcting an error that two inspectorates have documented, with a deadline that has already passed. That is a different footing to argue from.

The same report carries a caution that belongs here too: “This doesn’t mean that outcome 22 should be liberally applied to knife crime.” The point is accuracy about the rule, not a claim that Outcome 22 fits everything.

How to Argue for It

The script is short and the structure is the same as for any disposal argument:

PSR (to custody sergeant): “Sergeant, I am making representations on disposal. My client is 14, first contact with the system. The alleged offending is gravity 2 on the NPCC Child Gravity Matrix. A community resolution would not provide sufficient intervention here, the family has asked for a structured response. Outcome 22 with a YOT-led restorative meeting fits the case. YOT triage is available today. Can I ask the force to dispose of this as Outcome 22?”

For an adult client the argument shape adjusts slightly:

PSR (to custody sergeant): “Sergeant, I am making representations on disposal. My client has acknowledged that the offending is linked to a substance-misuse problem they have not previously addressed. The matter is low gravity. Liaison and Diversion can refer today. An Outcome 22 with engagement in addiction services would record the intervention without a caution. NPCC guidance supports this for adult cases. Can I ask the force to consider Outcome 22?”

One practical note on your audience. The scripts above address the custody sergeant, because that is who is usually in front of you. But NPCC guidance puts the Outcome 22 decision with the officer in the case and their supervisor, looking for “a clear rationale for why the OIC and/or supervisor believes this is a more effective outcome than a formal out of court disposal or charge”. If the custody sergeant is not the decision-maker, ask who is, and ask for your representations to reach them. Written representations after release are worth making for the same reason.

Three things make this work. First, naming the disposal, Outcome 22, not “diversionary activity” generally. Second, anchoring to the relevant framework, NPCC Child Gravity Matrix for children, NPCC Outcome 22 guidance for adults. Third, having the intervention ready, a YOT or L&D referral, a confirmed willing party for restorative meeting, a treatment service on side. The argument is operational, not abstract.

The Limits to Know

Outcome 22 is not a wave-it-away result. The intervention has to actually happen, and what follows non-engagement depends on which variant you are in. Where the disposal defers a caution or a prosecution, failure to comply means the original decision is upheld and your client can still be charged. Where it is an Outcome 22 no-further-action, the case is closed and Youth Justice Board guidance is explicit that the interventions “are entirely voluntary and cannot be enforced if not completed”.

That distinction is worth getting right in the room. Inspectors found three of six forces using forms that warned children that failing to complete the agreed actions “will result in legal action being taken against you”, and called that wording inaccurate and potentially coercive. Advise your client on the commitment honestly, but do not repeat a threat the framework does not support.

Outcome 22 is retained on police systems. It is not visible on standard DBS but can be disclosed on enhanced DBS at the chief officer’s discretion. Two things let you put a number on that reassurance. Informal out-of-court disposals, Outcome 22 among them, do not come under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 at all and are never automatically disclosed. And the numbers are small. The DBS issued around 4.1 million enhanced certificates in 2025 to 2026, and the Independent Monitor records about 5,200 certificates carrying additional police information in 2024, which is roughly 0.1 per cent. Around 65 per cent of enhanced checks are completed without any referral to a local force at all. Be careful how you use that figure with a client: it covers all police non-conviction information and is not broken down by disposal, so it is not an Outcome 22 rate.

So the honest advice is that the record exists, it is not nothing, and the realistic likelihood of it surfacing is very low.

Operational availability varies between forces. Some forces have well-developed Outcome 22 schemes with named partner providers; in others, the disposal exists but is rarely used. Knowing the picture in your local custody suite matters.

And the wider framework is uneven between adult and youth advocacy. Youth diversion has had consistent cross-party political support for two decades and is operationally mature. Adult diversion is patchier, the new Diversionary Caution under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 has been enacted but not yet commenced, and the named pre-charge schemes (Checkpoint, Turning Point, drug-diversion pilots) exist in some force areas and not others. Outcome 22 itself is available for both, but the surrounding framework is thinner on the adult side.

What the Evidence Does Not Show

One thing to be straight about, because the opposite is often implied. There is no reoffending evidence for Outcome 22 specifically. The College of Policing and University of Birmingham looked in 2024 and concluded “it is not possible to arrive at any firm conclusions concerning the effectiveness of the new category of OOCD, Outcome 22”. Outcome 22 recipients are not currently counted in national reoffending statistics at all, which is why. A first national impact evaluation was funded in October 2025 and its results are years away.

That is not an argument against asking for it. The case for Outcome 22 rests on two legal facts rather than on an effectiveness claim: it leaves a less damaging record than a caution, and it requires no admission. Both are true regardless of what the evaluation eventually finds.

Be careful with the well-known diversion schemes too. Checkpoint, Turning Point and the drug diversion pilots are mostly recorded as community resolutions or conditional cautions, not as Outcome 22, so their published results are not results for this disposal.

Bottom Line

Where you have a client, child or adult, a low-gravity matter, and a deliverable intervention, Outcome 22 is the strongest disposal that does not leave a caution-or-conviction record and does not require an admission of guilt. It is built into the disposal framework precisely for cases like this. The custody sergeant will not always raise it. The PSR who knows it by name and asks for it specifically is doing one of the most consequential things a police station representative does: making sure their client leaves custody with the right disposal, not the default one.

Outcome 22 is the most under-asked-for disposal in the disposal framework. Where the case fits, ask for it by name. Most custody sergeants will respect a PSR who knows what Outcome 22 is and what it is for.

— AccrediLaw senior practitioner

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