Every Police Outcome Code, Explained

⚠ 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.

Ask most police station representatives what happened to a case and you will get a disposal: charged, cautioned, NFA’d. Ask what outcome code was recorded against it and the room goes quiet.

That gap matters more than it sounds. The disposal is the conversation in the custody suite. The outcome code is what survives it. It is the entry that sits on police systems against the crime report, and it is what a future disclosure decision has to work with. Your client does not carry the argument you made. They carry the code that got typed in afterwards.

What an Outcome Code Actually Is

Outcome codes come from the Home Office Counting Rules for Recorded Crime, the standing instructions every force in England and Wales records crime against. The Outcomes Framework replaced the old “detections” regime in April 2013, and has been extended most years since.

Two documents matter, and they do not word things identically. The operational one, Outcomes for Recorded Crimes: Guidance for Frontline Officers and Staff, is what the officer in front of you is working to. The statistical one, the Crime outcomes in England and Wales Technical Annex, is what the published figures are built on. Where they differ, cite the operational guidance for anything about police station practice.

The Full List

Where a code has its own article, the row links to it. Only Outcome 22 does so far, and the rest will follow.

One row carries a genuine dispute rather than a simplification. Nobody in government describes the status of Outcome 22 the same way twice. The Home Office open data user guide of 30 January 2025 says it was “voluntary from April 2019, and compulsory from April 2021”. The technical annex published on 23 July 2026 says only “voluntary from April 2019” and mentions no change. NPCC guidance in 2022 predicted it “will become mandatory in 2023”, a date that appears in no Home Office document. And the words “voluntary” and “mandatory” appear nowhere at all in the 2026 operational guidance. If a code is compulsory, four official sources ought to agree that it is.

Two warnings about reading the rest of that table. The dates are introduction dates taken from the statistical Annex, because the operational guidance carries no commencement dates at all; several codes were later widened in scope without being renumbered, which is why some rows carry two dates. And the two official documents do not always describe the same thing. Outcome 12 is the sharpest example. The statistical Annex defines it only as a suspect “too ill (physical or mental health) to prosecute”, while the operational guidance adds a second limb the Annex omits entirely, covering a suspect “confirmed to have died either before the crime was reported to police or before enough evidence to charge could be obtained”. The guidance also sets a threshold the Annex does not: ill health here means “serious illness where the suspect is unlikely to recover”.

Twenty four codes is more than most practitioners expect, but the number is less useful than the shape. Read them in four groups and the list stops being a list.

The Codes That Leave a Mark

Codes 1, 1A, 2, 2A, 3, 3A, 4 and 6. Charge, caution, TIC, penalty notice. These put something formal on the record.

One distinction inside this group is worth holding onto. Cautions and TICs require your client to admit the offence. A Penalty Notice for Disorder does not, because paying it discharges liability without any admission of guilt. Representatives sometimes advise on a PND as though it were a caution in miniature. It is a different animal.

Where these rest on statute, it is worth knowing which. Youth cautions sit on section 66ZA of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, adult conditional cautions on section 22 of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, and Penalty Notices for Disorder on sections 1 to 11 of the Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001. Note the range. PNDs get cited as sections 1 to 2 all the time, and that is wrong.

Taken into consideration is the odd one out, because it has no statutory basis at all. It is a common law sentencing practice governed by the Sentencing Council guideline and the MG18 form. Section 74 of the Sentencing Act 2020 is sometimes cited for it and does not apply, since that section covers reduction in sentence for assistance to prosecution.

The sub-codes matter because they are common and almost nobody asks about them. A 1A, 2A or 3A records that the disposal was for an alternative offence to the one originally recorded. If the recorded crime was a section 18 and your client is cautioned for a section 39, the outcome is a 3A, not a 3. It is the code that tells the honest story about how far the allegation moved.

The Five You Can Actually Argue For

Codes 7, 8, 22, 23 and 24. This is the part of the framework a representative can influence. Everything else on the list happens with or without you.

• Code 7, cannabis or khat warning. Still a valid recordable outcome in the 2026 framework, and still checked in the Home Office data quality routine. But it has vanished from the current out-of-court resolution guidance that officers are actually pointed to. Treat it as available and unfashionable rather than abolished. The statutory abolition in Part 6 of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 is on the books and has not been commenced.
• Code 8, community resolution. Informal, proportionate, no formal sanction. Entirely non-statutory.
• Code 22, diversionary, educational or intervention activity. The disposal we have written about separately: structured intervention recorded, no caution, no conviction, and critically no admission of guilt required.
• Codes 23 and 24, deferred prosecution. New on 1 April 2026, for children and adults respectively.

The arrival of 23 and 24 is the most important recent change to this framework, and it is widely described wrongly. They did not carve anything out of Outcome 22. Outcome 22 survives intact, with its own full section and checklist. Codes 23 and 24 were added alongside it.

The real distinction is evidential, and it is the thing to get right. Codes 23 and 24 apply where a prosecution decision is held in abeyance: “the decision to prosecute is put on hold, whilst the offender completes the agreed diversionary conditions”, and “should the offender fail to comply, then the prosecution decision is upheld”. 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 in Outcome 22. A live prosecution decision parked while your client completes conditions is 23 or 24. Choosing between those two is only about age. Code 23 is for a child, 24 for an adult, and their operative wording is otherwise identical.

Do not confuse these with Deferred Prosecution Agreements. A DPA under Schedule 17 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 cannot apply to your client at all: 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. See the Youth Justice Legal Centre briefing on deferred prosecution and the crime recording rules for frontline officers 2026/27.

The Codes That Close a Case With Nothing on It

Codes 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 18 and 21. Public interest decisions, evidential difficulties, and investigations that ran out of road.

Two of these get confused constantly, including in published material. Outcome 18 means no suspect was ever identified. Outcome 21 means a suspect was identified and the police decided further investigation was not in the public interest. They are very different entries against your client’s name, and only one of them attaches to a person.

Outcome 21 carries a consequence worth knowing. The guidance records that it “is also used operationally as an indication to Disclosure and Barring staff, that care should be taken before routinely disclosing the information”, and requires the force crime registrar to maintain oversight of every record where it is applied. It is the one closure code with a built-in disclosure caution.

Note also a wording shift worth carrying into any training you deliver. In April 2026 codes 14 and 16 were reworded from the victim “does not support” further action to the victim being “not able to support” it. Small change, different implication, and it moves the emphasis from a choice to a constraint. Cite the guidance or the recording rules for this, never the Technical Annex, which still carries the pre-2026 wording despite being published in July 2026.

The Blockers and the Paperwork

Codes 5, 11, 12, 13 and 17 record something that stopped a prosecution that was otherwise available: a death, an age, an illness, an expired time limit. Code 11 rests on section 50 of the Children and Young Persons Act 1933, which is as absolute as statute gets: “It shall be conclusively presumed that no child under the age of ten years can be guilty of any offence.” Codes 19 and 20 are administrative, covering fraud reports filed by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau and cases handed to another agency.

Code 19 is fraud-specific and will not come up in a custody suite. It is in the statistics and in the frontline recording rules, but it is absent from the outcomes guidance for frontline officers, whose contents jump straight from 18 to 20. That is not an oversight. Filing a fraud report is an NFIB decision, not one an officer in a custody suite makes.

The Asymmetry Is the Point

Of 24 codes, you can argue for five. The other nineteen record decisions taken without you, or facts you cannot move.

That sounds like a reason to learn only the five. It is the opposite. Knowing the nineteen is what tells you, fast, whether the outcome being offered is the one that fits the case or just the one that custody reaches for most often. You cannot spot a lazy Outcome 18 if you do not know what an Outcome 21 looks like.