Today, the Council has published data covering the factors taken into account when sentencing adult offenders for robbery (where this was the principal offence), and details of the sentence imposed. We hope that users will find these data useful in order to conduct their own analysis.

These data were collected from the Crown Court between November 2016 and April 2017 after the publication of the Council’s Robbery offences guidelines, which came into force in April 2016. The data collected were used in the robbery guideline evaluation, which was published in February 2019.

The data contain information on the culpability and harm factors taken into account by sentencers, details of any aggravating or mitigating factors (including previous convictions), information about the guilty plea where relevant (including the reductions applied), and details of the final sentence imposed. They also contain information on the ‘single most important factor’ affecting the sentence, which sentencers in the Crown Court were also asked to record.

This is the third release of the Council’s bespoke targeted data collections that we have moved to undertaking since the cessation of the Crown Court Sentencing Survey. It follows publication of the magistrates’ courts data collections covering the offences of theft from a shop or stall in December 2020, and drug offences in July 2022.

Alongside the data, the Council has also published a suite of documents to help users understand the data. This includes a metadata document (an Excel spreadsheet detailing the variables included within the data), a background quality report (which is an assessment of the quality of the data from a variety of different dimensions) and a disclosure statement.

If you have any feedback on this data publication, please email research@sentencingcouncil.gov.uk.