What 'no further action' means after a police arrest

Last updated 2026-09-05 · Published by PoliceComplaint.com

"No further action" after an arrest means the police have closed their investigation without charging you. It is not a finding that you did nothing wrong, and it is not a finding that the arrest was lawful. Those are three separate questions, and an NFA letter answers only the first.

What the decision actually settles

An NFA decision records that the investigation has ended without a charge, a caution or any other formal outcome. It can be taken by the police, or by the Crown Prosecution Service if the file went that far. The usual reason given is that there is not enough evidence for a realistic prospect of conviction.

It does not clear you the way an acquittal does, because there was never a trial. It also says nothing about whether the officers had the power to arrest you in the first place.

How many arrests end this way is not published

The Home Office recorded 754,046 arrests by the 43 territorial forces in England and Wales in the year ending 31 March 2025, up 5% on the 721,103 recorded the year before. Source: Police powers and procedures: stop and search, arrests and mental health detentions, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2025, published 6 November 2025.

What is not published is what happened next. That release counts arrests, not arrest outcomes, so there is no official national figure for how many of those 754,046 people were released with no further action. Any percentage you see quoted for that is an estimate, not a statistic.

Whether the arrest was lawful is a separate question

Under section 24 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, a constable arresting without a warrant needs two things at once: reasonable grounds to suspect that an offence has been committed and that you committed it, and reasonable grounds to believe that arresting you is necessary for one of the reasons listed in that section.

Code of Practice G, made under the same Act, sets out that necessity test and requires the arresting officer to record the grounds. Both limbs have to be met. Reasonable suspicion on its own is not enough if the arrest was not necessary.

An officer can hold reasonable grounds and still turn out to be wrong. The law does not require the officer to be right. That is why an NFA outcome does not by itself make an arrest unlawful, and why the lawfulness question turns on what the officer knew and recorded at the time rather than on how the case ended.

Bail, release under investigation, and how long it can run

Being released before an NFA decision usually happens one of two ways. On pre-charge bail you are released with a date to return, often with conditions. Released under investigation means no return date and no conditions, while the investigation carries on.

Since 28 October 2022, under the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, a custody officer can authorise an initial bail period of up to three months. An inspector can extend it to six months, a superintendent to nine, and anything beyond nine months in a standard case has to go to a magistrate.

Release under investigation has no equivalent clock. That is the difference people notice most in practice: an RUI case can stay open a long time with no date attached to it.

What happens to the arrest record

An NFA outcome does not erase the arrest. Two different things are held in two different places, and they are treated differently.

Biometrics. Fingerprints are held on IDENT1 and DNA profiles on the National DNA Database. Where someone is arrested, not charged, and has no previous convictions, these are in most cases deleted, subject to the retention rules in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and to any application by the force to keep them.

The PNC record. The arrest itself, with your name and details, stays on the Police National Computer. It is not removed automatically. Deleting it means applying through the record deletion process run by the ACRO Criminal Records Office, and the decision rests with a chief officer.

An arrest without a charge is not a conviction, so it does not appear on a basic or standard DBS check. It can in principle be disclosed on an enhanced check, because section 113B of the Police Act 1997 lets a chief officer include information they reasonably believe is relevant to the role being applied for.

If you think the arrest was wrong

Two routes exist, they run separately, and you can use both.

Complain to the force. Forces logged 94,940 complaint cases in 2024/25 (IOPC police complaints statistics, England and Wales, 2024/25). If you are not satisfied with the outcome you can apply for a review, and reviews are decided by the Police and Crime Commissioner's office or by the IOPC rather than by the force itself. Across every review recorded that year, 1,484 of 6,046 (24.5%) found the force's outcome was not reasonable and proportionate. Among the 37 forces completing 50 or more reviews the rate ran from 6.9% to 40.1%, median 21.3%. How reviews work, or look up the figures for your force.

A civil claim. The complaints system does not award compensation. A claim for damages is a separate process on its own deadlines, and which claim fits depends on what happened:

• Wrongful arrest, where the arrest itself was not lawful
• Unlawful imprisonment, covering the period you were detained
• Malicious prosecution, which requires a prosecution to have been started and then ended in your favour. If you were released with no further action and never charged, there was no prosecution, so this one will usually not apply

Time limits differ by claim type and some of them are short, so the sensible order is to find out where you stand rather than waiting for anything else to finish first. The three routes are set out here.

What to keep

Keep the NFA letter or email and the date on it, any bail paperwork, the officers' names and numbers if you noted them, and your custody record if you have it. You can ask the force for your custody record, and asking sooner is easier than asking later.

If it is the search rather than the arrest you are asking about, the stop and search version of this question is answered here.