About the UK Offence Report
An index of the criminal offences created by UK secondary legislation — the regulations, orders and rules made by ministers under powers granted by Act of Parliament.
Why it exists
There is no official list. The offences in Acts of Parliament are well catalogued; the offences in the instruments made under those Acts are not, even though that is where most of the criminal law now lives. A person can be prosecuted for breaching a regulation that no published index records, that was never debated, and whose text has since been replaced.
This report was built by reading the whole statutory instrument corpus published by The National Archives — 156,107 instruments — finding the provisions that create offences, and classifying each one.
What is in it
- 23,878 offences, each with its own page.
- 6,423 instruments that create them.
- 5,925 explanatory notes, as published by the department that made the instrument.
- 3,574 mentions in Hansard, across the 6,415 instruments searched.
Who wrote this
Researched and written by Rose Traviss. The extraction rules, the classifications, the generated examples and the prose are one person's work, and errors in them are hers rather than any source's. Rose Traviss is the founder and director of Assize Data Ltd (who we are).
Who publishes this
An Assize Research publication. Assize Research is a trading name of Assize Data Ltd, a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 17510115. Registered office: c/o IWN Accountancy, The Echo Building, 18 Albert Road, Bournemouth BH1 1BZ. Assize Research publishes independent research on how the UK justice system is working, free to read; this report is one of its titles, and its brand page sets out the commitments every piece published under the name has to meet. How this one meets them is on research standards.
UK Offence Report is independent. It is not a government department, court, tribunal or producer of official statistics, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to The National Archives, legislation.gov.uk, either House of Parliament, the Sentencing Council, the Ministry of Justice or HM Courts & Tribunals Service.
No outside body funded, commissioned or had any say in this report. If research published under this name is ever funded or commissioned by anyone else, it will say so on the piece itself.
What it is not
It is not legal advice, and it is not authoritative. The authoritative text is on legislation.gov.uk, and every page here links to it. If you are facing a prosecution, or advising somebody who is, read the legislation and take advice.
The classifications are made by rule from the words of the provision. They can be wrong, and a court may read a provision differently from the way its words read. The methodology page sets out how the rules work and what they miss.
Assize Data Ltd is not a law firm and is not regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority or the Bar Standards Board. It does not carry out reserved legal activities for others, and it does not give legal advice.
Corrections
A wrong entry is worth more to fix than a missing one is to add. If a page here misstates a provision, the fastest fix is a correction against the offence's own URL, quoting what the source says: how to ask for a correction, and what happens next.