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 6,070 instruments searched.

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.

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.