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A sexual risk order can be made against somebody who has never been convicted of an offence, never been cautioned, and never even been charged. It is a civil order, decided on the balance of probabilities, and it can restrict where a person goes, what devices they own, who they may contact and whether they can leave the country. It runs for a minimum of two years. This is a plain-English account of the test, what an order can contain, the notification duty that starts three days after service, and how a single breach leads to the sex offenders register.
Almost everybody has heard of the sex offenders register. Very few people have a clear picture of the sexual risk order (SRO), and it is the order most likely to arrive without warning or prior notice. It is also one of the few parts of the criminal justice landscape that can reach somebody who has been through no part of it.
It exists because Parliament decided the police should be able to manage a risk of sexual harm, and to prevent harm before it occurs, without waiting for a prosecution that may never happen. Whatever view is taken of that, it is the law, and the practical consequence is straightforward: an allegation that was investigated and dropped, or charged and acquitted, can be followed by an application that restricts a person's life for years.
Sexual risk orders (SROs) replaced risk of sexual harm orders in March 2015, under the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.
Section 122A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 sets out the grounds. A magistrates' court may make an order where it is satisfied that the defendant has done an act of a sexual nature as a result of which there is reasonable cause to believe that it is necessary for a sexual risk order to be made for the purpose of protecting the public, or particular members of the public, from harm. Police officers have discretion in making an application to the Magistrates' Court.
The statute calls the person a defendant even though there is no charge and no prosecution, which is itself a fair indication of how the process feels from the inside.
Two features of that threshold decide most of these cases.
"An act of a sexual nature" is not exhaustively defined, and it need not be unlawful. Conduct that is not an offence at all can found an application. That is a wider gateway than most people assume when they hear that a court is being asked to restrict somebody's life to protect against a sexual risk of harm.
The standard of proof is the civil one. The court has to be satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the act occurred, and that ongoing risk exists. It does not have to be sure. Evidence a jury would not convict on can be enough, and frequently is, which is why an acquittal or a decision to take no further action does not close the subject if either the police or CPS believe that the application is necessary to protect against sexual risk in the future.
The protective purpose is not limited to the public at large. It extends to children or vulnerable adults generally, or particular children or vulnerable adults, and to protecting children or vulnerable adults abroad from harm outside the United Kingdom.
An application is made to a magistrates' court by a chief officer of police, the Director General of the National Crime Agency, or the chief constable of the British Transport Police. In practice, it is prepared by a police officer in a public protection unit, and the material behind it is often drawn from more than one of the police forces that have had dealings with the individual concerned.
The application is civil, and that changes the evidence, as well as the standard by which the evidence is to be assessed.
Hearsay evidence is admissible. In an application for such, material can be put before the magistrates court that would ordinarily not be admissible in a criminal trial, and the person whose account founds the application may never be cross examined at all. Police information from other forces, and material from social services, can be relied on in the same way.
That is the feature practitioners object to most, and it is the one least understood by people served with an application. It is also the reason the evidential work has to be done properly and early: where an account will not be tested by cross examination, it has to be tested on paper, on the evidence.
An order prohibits the person from doing anything described in it. In practice, the recurring prohibitions are:
Since section 122BA, an order may also impose positive requirements, not only prohibitions, so a person can be required to do something, such as to install particular accountability software on the device, rather than merely to refrain from doing it.
There are limits, and they are the ground on which these applications are actually fought. A prohibition has to be necessary for the protective purpose, it has to be proportionate, and it has to be clear enough to be obeyed. A term drafted so widely that a person cannot tell from one day to the next whether they are complying is objectionable on all three counts.
Proportionality is where the family life argument does real work. An order interfering with contact between a person and their own children, or preventing them from working or being employed, engages Article 8 of the European Convention, and the court has to weigh that interference against the protective purpose that the order is said to serve. The court considers the personal circumstances of the person in front of it, not a template. Deleting unnecessary prohibitions is a modest-sounding exercise, and for somebody whose work or family contact turns on it, the difference can be life changing.
A foreign travel prohibition may not exceed five years under section 122C, although it can be renewed for further periods of up to five years.
An SRO is a civil order. It is not a criminal conviction and not a criminal record. That is the accurate answer, and it is not the whole answer.
An order is recorded on the Police National Computer. It is capable of being disclosed on an enhanced DBS check where a chief officer considers it relevant, so it can reach an employer in regulated work even though nothing has been proved to the criminal standard. Where children are involved, social services are commonly notified.
An SRO does not make somebody one of the registered sex offenders, and it is worth being precise about that, because the assumption that it does causes real harm to people who are not.
A conviction for breaching the order is a different matter. That is a criminal conviction, it goes on the criminal record in the ordinary way, it carries a maximum penalty of five years, and a custodial sentence is realistic where the breach was deliberate.
Where an application has been made and not yet determined, the court can make an interim sexual risk order under section 122E.
An interim order can be made before the evidence has been heard and tested, on the basis of an urgent need to restrict the individual subject to it. It has effect for a fixed period, and it ends when the main application is decided. It carries the same notification duty and the same breach offence as a full order, so the practical consequences begin long before anybody has decided whether such an application should succeed at all. Such orders are the ones most worth resisting early, because the individual subject to one is restricted on the thinnest material the process ever relies on.
This is the part most often stated wrongly, including by the AI summaries now sitting at the top of these search results.
Section 122F imposes a notification duty of its own. A person subject to a sexual risk order or an interim sexual risk order must notify their name, home address, and in some cases, also their passport and banking details to the police within three days of the order being served, and must keep that information up to date.
That is not the same thing as the notification requirements in Part 2 of the Act, which are far more extensive and are what people mean by the register. It is narrower. It is also real, it starts almost immediately, and failing to comply with it is a breach.
So the common statement that an SRO does not put you on the register is true as far as it goes, and it misleads if left there. There is a duty from day three. It is simply a different and lighter one.
Breach of an SRO is an offence under section 122H. Doing anything prohibited by the order, without reasonable excuse, carries six months or a fine or both on summary conviction and five years imprisonment on indictment. It is a criminal offence punishable in its own right, whatever the position on the underlying allegation.
Then comes the provision that changes everything, and that almost no page joins to the rest.
Under section 122I, a person convicted of an offence under section 122H becomes subject to the notification requirements in Part 2. The full ones. The sex register.
Set the three steps out together, because nobody else does:
The consequence is worth stating plainly. A person who has never been convicted of a sexual offence can end up on the sex offenders register, by way of a civil order, made on the balance of probabilities and one conviction for breaching a term of it.
That is why an application should never be conceded quickly on the basis that the order sounds less grave than a charge. It is also why the width of the terms matters so much: the wider the order, the easier it is to breach, and breach is the doorway.
The two orders are constantly confused, and the difference is simple.
A sexual harm prevention order follows upon application of a conviction, a caution, or a finding, for an offence listed in Schedule 3 or Schedule 5 to the Act. It runs for a minimum of five years or indefinitely. On conviction, the power now sits in sections 345 to 347 of the Sentencing Act 2020.
A sexual risk order requires none of that. It is the order for the person against whom nothing has been proved to the criminal standard, and its minimum is two years rather than five.
We have written separately and at length about how a sexual harm prevention order is imposed and how to challenge it. If an order has followed a conviction, that is the piece to read.
Section 122I leads into the Part 2 notification requirements, so the state of that regime matters here.
Sections 118 to 126 of the Crime and Policing Act 2026 amend Part 2, and none of them is in force. They cover notification of a change of name, notification of absence from a sole or main residence, a requirement to notify before entering premises where children are present, an alternative method of notification, review of the indefinite requirements, a restriction on applying for replacement identity documents in a new name, and a power of entry and search.
I have checked this against the commencement regulations rather than the Home Office factsheet, which describes the changes and gives no dates:
The legislation.gov.uk text of Part 2 records the 2026 amendments as prospective and not yet in force as at 31 August 2026. Anybody advising that the new rules apply now is wrong. This position can change with a single instrument, so it is worth checking the date on anything you read about it, including this.
There is a right of appeal against the making of an order, under section 122G, to the Crown Court, and it is subject to short time limits.
Separately, section 122D allows an application to vary, renew or discharge an order. What succeeds is a specific and evidenced proposition: that a particular prohibition is no longer necessary, that circumstances have changed in a documented way, or that a term is preventing lawful work or contact with the person's own children. A general submission that time has passed does not.
Three things are worth knowing immediately.
Do not consent to the terms to get it over with. These orders are often made by agreement, at a hearing nobody prepared for, in terms drafted entirely by the applicant. Consent is very difficult to unpick afterwards, and the terms are what you will live with for many years.
Ask for the draft order in advance. It is the smallest step on this list, and it changes what is realistically achievable, because it is the difference between arguing a term and reading it for the first time in the courtroom.
What you have said elsewhere reaches this application. An account given in a police interview under caution, to an employer, or in a regulator's process is available to the court. Where an investigation is still running, the decision about what to say and when has to be taken with both in view.
We act for people facing sexual risk order applications, and for people already subject to orders drafted more widely than the protective purpose requires. Defending applications of this kind is its own discipline, closer to civil litigation than to a trial, and it is not what most criminal practices spend their time doing.
In practice, that means testing whether the act of a sexual nature is made out at all, rather than treating the application as a formality once an allegation exists. It means arguing each prohibition separately on necessity and proportionality, even where the principle of an order cannot be resisted. It means asking for the draft in advance. It means taking the section 122F duty seriously from the day it starts, because a technical failure there is a breach like any other, and breach is what leads to an individual at risk of being on the sex register.
Where a criminal investigation is running alongside, we put the case for no further action to the police through our pre-charge representation practice, and where a charge has been brought, the same analysis supports an application for the charging decision to be reviewed and the case discontinued. Where the underlying allegation is historic, the application is often the first occasion on which anybody tests the evidence at all. This forms part of our wider criminal defence work.
These are cases where discretion matters as much as the law. They are handled quietly, and nothing about a matter leaves this firm.
We offer confidential consultations, in person at our London offices or remotely by secure call. Initial enquiries are handled discreetly and quickly.
If an application has been served on you, speak to us before the first hearing. The terms are set there and they are difficult to change afterwards.
It is a civil order under section 122A of the Sexual Offences Act 2003, made by a magistrates' court where it is satisfied that a person has done an act of a sexual nature giving reasonable cause to believe an order is necessary to protect the public from sexual harm. No criminal record, conviction, caution or charge is required.
The civil standard. The court must be satisfied on the balance of probabilities that the act of a sexual nature occurred. It does not have to be sure, which is why an acquittal at court does not prevent an order being made.
A minimum of two years, and it can be made indefinitely. A prohibition on foreign travel is capped at five years at a time, although it can be renewed for further periods of up to five years.
The order by itself does not make you subject to the Part 2 notification requirements. It does impose its own duty: under section 122F you must notify your name and home address to the police within three days of service. If you are convicted of breaching the order, section 122I then makes you subject to the full Part 2 requirements.
Yes. An SRO is not a criminal conviction and not a criminal record, and it is recorded on the Police National Computer. It is capable of being disclosed on an enhanced DBS check where a chief officer considers it relevant.
Breach is an offence under section 122H, carrying six months or a fine or both on summary conviction and five years imprisonment on indictment. A conviction also brings the Part 2 notification requirements into effect under section 122I.
An order made under section 122E while a full application is pending. It can be made before the evidence has been tested, it lasts for a fixed period, and it ends when the main application is decided. It carries the same notification duty and the same breach offence as a full order.
A sexual harm prevention order follows a conviction, caution or finding for an offence listed in Schedule 3 or Schedule 5, and runs for a minimum of five years. A sexual risk order requires no conviction at all and runs for a minimum of two.
Yes. There is a right of appeal to the Crown Court under section 122G, subject to short time limits, and an application to vary, renew or discharge can be made under section 122D. What succeeds is a specific, evidenced case that a term is no longer necessary or is preventing lawful work or family contact.
Lex Vindico Group is regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority. We represent individuals nationally across England and Wales in criminal, regulatory, and parallel-proceedings defence at every stage, and most decisively, at the pre-charge stage.
This article is written by Akram Mula, LLM, Solicitor Advocate and CPS-approved Prosecutor, founder of Lex Vindico Group. It is general legal information about sexual risk orders and the notification requirements, not legal advice on any specific case. For advice on your specific circumstances, contact our team directly.
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