Easier search and clearer routes through Criminal Justice Hub

We have improved search and reorganised the ways you can find information on Criminal Justice Hub. The changes respond to feedback about information being spread across different parts of the website.

They are designed to help people accused, convicted or sentenced, their families and friends, members of the public, and professionals and researchers find the information they need more quickly and easily.

Search more of Criminal Justice Hub

Our website search now brings together public guidance, website policies, forms, prison and probation policy documents, acronyms, sentencing videos, prisons, inspection reports, legal aid providers, police custody suites and police forces.

It also searches the offence classifications catalogue and includes relevant directory and tool pages. Catalogue records and other resources that are not ordinary published pages appear in a separate, clearly labelled results section.

You can search using words from a page or public details such as a prison postcode, a policy reference, an offence code, a court or a judge’s name where those details are available. You do not have to know the exact page title.

Filters that work together

You can narrow results by content type, topic, collection or published date, and choose relevance, newest first, oldest first or title order. The police force filter helps you find custody suites.

Filters now work together consistently. Changing your search words keeps your selected filters, and you can see and remove the filters you have applied.

Not every record has a topic, collection or publication date. Applying one of these filters excludes records without that information. Offence catalogue records do not have individual publication dates, so date sorting does not apply to their separate results section.

Clearer starting points on the homepage

The homepage now offers clearer starting points for:

• people accused, convicted or sentenced who need information about police contact, court, sentencing, prison, probation or release
• families, friends and members of the public looking for visiting information, support after a crime or help supporting someone else
• professionals and researchers looking for forms, offence classifications, policies, reference material and data.

These are different routes to shared information, not separate versions of the guidance. You can use any route, browse by topic or go straight to search. You do not need an account to browse public guidance.

Simpler navigation through the website

The header gives clear access to Guidance and support, Tools and resources, and News and updates. The mobile layout gives more priority to the menu and search, with account and display controls kept separate from the main tasks.

Topic pages group related tasks and provide clearer onward links. These include support for victims, children and families, and a direct route to probation information for people whose sentence does not involve leaving prison.

Long guides and policies have clearer section navigation. We have also organised Tools and resources into more useful groups, including data and research, with links to the prison population dashboard and offender flows from court to prison.

Our existing page addresses have been kept. We have corrected selected old links and improved the sitemap, which updates as eligible public content changes.

Help us keep improving

These changes are a step towards making Criminal Justice Hub easier to use. They do not mean that every journey has been tested with every audience or that every accessibility issue has been resolved.

If you cannot find something, get an unexpected search result or have difficulty using the navigation, please tell us what you were trying to do and what could be improved. Do not include sensitive personal information or details of a criminal case.