Crime statistics in the United Kingdom refers to the data collected in the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the European mainland, continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...
, and that collected by the individual areas,
England and Wales
England and Wales () is one of the three legal jurisdictions of the United Kingdom. It covers the constituent countries England and Wales and was formed by the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542. The substantive law of the jurisdiction is Eng ...
,
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
and
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...
, which operate separate judicial systems. It covers data related to
crime in the United Kingdom
Crime in the United Kingdom describes acts of violent crime and non-violent crime that take place within the United Kingdom. Courts and police systems are separated into three sections, based on the different judicial systems of England and Wale ...
. As with
crime statistics elsewhere, they are broadly divided into
victim studies and police statistics. More recently, third-party reporting is used to quantify specific under-reported issues, for example,
hate crime.
Crime surveys
![CrimeinUK](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/CrimeinUK.png)
The
Crime Survey for England and Wales
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (previously called the British Crime Survey) is a systematic victim study, currently carried out by Kantar Public (formally known as BMRB Ltd) on behalf of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Curated by ...
is an attempt to measure both the amount of crime, and the impact of crime on England and Wales. The original survey (carried out in 1982, to cover the 1981 year) covered all three judicial areas of the UK, and was therefore referred to as the British Crime Survey, but now it only covers England and Wales. In
Scotland
Scotland (, ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. Covering the northern third of the island of Great Britain, mainland Scotland has a Anglo-Scottish border, border with England to the southeast ...
and
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland ( ga, Tuaisceart Éireann ; sco, label= Ulster-Scots, Norlin Airlann) is a part of the United Kingdom, situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, that is variously described as a country, province or region. Nort ...
, similar surveys, namely the
Scottish Crime and Victimisation Survey
Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including:
*Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland
*Scottish English
*Scottish national identity, the Scottish ide ...
and
Northern Ireland Crime Survey have similar purposes. These surveys collect information about the victims of crime, the circumstances surrounding the crime, and the behaviour of the perpetrators. They are used to plan, and measure the results of, crime reduction or perception measures. In addition, they collect data about the perception of issues such as
antisocial behaviour
Antisocial behavior is a behavior that is defined as the violation of the rights of others by committing crime, such as stealing and physical attack in addition to other behaviors such as lying and manipulation. It is considered to be disrupti ...
and the criminal justice system.
Other crime surveys include the Commercial Victimisation Survey, which covers small and medium-sized businesses,
and the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey, with a particular focus on young people.
Background and counting rules
Until the late 1990s crime figures for varying crime types were not released to the general public at individual police force level. The annual publication 'Crime in England & Wales' produced by the Home Office began to break the figures down to a smaller area in 1996. Crime figures in England & Wales during the late 1990s and early 2000s were often misinterpreted in the media and scrutinised because of frequent changes in the way crimes were counted and recorded that lead to rises in the crime category 'Violence Against the Person'.
Commenting on figures from 1 April 1998 onwards, the then-Home Secretary
Jack Straw
John Whitaker Straw (born 3 August 1946) is a British politician who served in the Cabinet from 1997 to 2010 under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He held two of the traditional Great Offices of State, as Home Secretary ...
said "changes in the way crime statistics are compiled are in line with recommendations by senior police officers. They are intended to give a more accurate picture of the level of offences". The largest increases were recorded in the "Violence Against the Person" category owing to the inclusion of
common assault
Common may refer to:
Places
* Common, a townland in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland
* Boston Common, a central public park in Boston, Massachusetts
* Cambridge Common, common land area in Cambridge, Massachusetts
* Clapham Common, originally com ...
figures to accompany other offence types within this category that include
assault occasioning actual bodily harm
Assault occasioning actual bodily harm (often abbreviated to Assault OABH, AOABH or simply ABH) is a statutory offence of aggravated assault in England and Wales, Northern Ireland, the Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Hong Kong an ...
,
grievous bodily harm,
harassment, murder, possession of offensive weapons and a selection of other low volume violent crimes grouped together by the Metropolitan Police as 'other violence'.
The change in counting rules, and the significant impact it had on violence against the person figures, was often misconstrued by the media as real increases. The rises in violence resulting from this were highly publicised on an annual basis.
Today crime figures are made available nationally at
Local Authority
Local government is a generic term for the lowest tiers of public administration within a particular sovereign state. This particular usage of the word government refers specifically to a level of administration that is both geographically-loca ...
and
Ward
Ward may refer to:
Division or unit
* Hospital ward, a hospital division, floor, or room set aside for a particular class or group of patients, for example the psychiatric ward
* Prison ward, a division of a penal institution such as a pris ...
level. The Metropolitan Police have made detailed crime figures, broken down by category at borough and ward level, available on their website since 2000. Many websites and applications took advantage of this data to build crime maps of London's neighbourhoods. Recorded crime rates in the UK include threats and cases where no physical violence was used so are hard to compare with international statistics, and because even large-scale victim surveys are national rather than local the only available breakdown by borough is from recorded crime, largely calls for service from the police which do not necessarily reflect underlying levels of crime.
A detailed breakdown of the way crimes are counted are available from the Home Office website. Recorded crime increased in England and Wales during most of the 1980s, reaching a peak in 1992, and then fell each year until 1998/99 when the changes in the Counting Rules resulted in an increase in recorded offences. This was followed by the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) in April 2002 which led to a rise in recording in 2002/03 and 2003/04, as the rules bedded-in within forces. Crime figures were originally collected to cover a
calendar year, however this changed from 1998 when crime statistics began to be collated and grouped by
financial year
A fiscal year (or financial year, or sometimes budget year) is used in government accounting, which varies between countries, and for budget purposes. It is also used for financial reporting by businesses and other organizations. Laws in many ...
.
Police statistics
The accuracy of police statistics is questionable. Crimes are under-reported, as victims may be reluctant to report them due to considering it too trivial, embarrassing, aversion to dealing with the police, or fear of repercussions by the perpetrators. The police also sometimes fail to record correctly all crimes reported to them. The police may not accept a person’s claim that they are a victim of crime, or sometimes deliberately do not record a crime to save time or manipulate performance figures.
In 2002, the Home Office introduced a
National Crime Recording Standard in England and Wales, due to a lack of uniformity in how police forces recorded
notifiable offence
A notifiable offence is any offence under United Kingdom law where the police must inform the Home Office, who use the report to compile crime statistics. The term Notifiable Offence is sometimes confused with recordable offence.
Reporting noti ...
s. One issue identified was , the practice of writing off reported notifiable offences from police force statistics. The National Crime Recording Standard was applied inconsistently across crimes and regions, frequently incorrectly,
[Victims let down by poor crime-recording](_blank)
/ref> for instance, it varied significantly by area: in the year to March 2011, 2% of reported rapes in Gloucestershire were recorded as "no crime", while 30% of reported rapes in Kent were so classified, making accurate comparison difficult. This was sometimes due to pressure from performance and other factors. During the period November 2012 – October 2013, an average of 19% of crimes reported to the police are not recorded, with one quarter of sexual crimes and one-third of violent crimes not being recorded, with rape being particularly bad at 37% 'no-criming'. Reporting is inconsistent across local forces: "In a few forces, crime-recording is very good, and shows that it can be done well and the statistics can be trusted. In some other forces, it is unacceptably bad." The failure to properly record crime was called "inexcusably poor" and "indefensible" by Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary Tom Winsor. Twenty percent of reviewed decisions to cancel a report were found to be incorrect, and in about a quarter of cases there was no record of victims being informed that their report had been cancelled.
Senior members of the policing establishment admit to long-term, widespread "fiddling" of figures, such as John Stevens, Baron Stevens of Kirkwhelpington
John Arthur Stevens, Baron Stevens of Kirkwhelpington, (born 21 October 1942) was Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis (head of the Metropolitan Police Service) from 2000 until 2005. From 1991 to 1996, he was Chief Constable of Northumb ...
, former head of the Metropolitan Police Service:
In April 2013, the framework for reporting of official police statistics was amended to address these issues. The Home Office delegated the responsibility for auditing a police forces compliance with the National Crime Recording Standard to Her Majesty's Chief Inspectorate of Constabulary, later renamed Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire Rescue Service. The first statistics using the new framework were published in July 2014. After the 2014 changes, five yearly rolling compliance audits by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire Rescue Service found that police force still do not uniformly comply with The National Crime Recording Standards. In 2014, the Office of National Statistics
An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific du ...
stated that the unreliability of notifiable offence statistics meant they did not meet the quality standards required of national statistics.
England and Wales
English criminal law
English criminal law concerns offences, their prevention and the consequences, in England and Wales. Criminal conduct is considered to be a wrong against the whole of a community, rather than just the private individuals affected. The state, i ...
details a series of criminal acts, and when these should apply. English courts
A court is any person or institution, often as a government institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accorda ...
apply criminal statutes and common law
In law, common law (also known as judicial precedent, judge-made law, or case law) is the body of law created by judges and similar quasi-judicial tribunals by virtue of being stated in written opinions."The common law is not a brooding omnipres ...
as part of their responsibility for applying justice and dealing with the culprits.
According to the Home Office, there were around "1.3 million violent crimes in England and Wales in 2017, which can be misconstrued, because the United Kingdom uses a less lenient view of violent crime, which wouldn't be reported in North America. This makes England and Wales worse than Denmark, Australia, Japan, but much safer than France, United States, Canada, Belgium.". This has not changed in 2018, with figures remaining close to 2017's according to the CSEW, however a 6% decrease in offences with a knife or sharp instrument was seen in 2018, with recorded figures at 40,829. Other areas of crime in 2018 included robbery (82,566), an 11% increase from 2017; burglary (424,846), a 3% decrease from 2017; and vehicle theft (463,497), a 2% increase from 2017.
The strength of the police force, as of 2018, in England and Wales was around 125,651 of whom 37,104 are women. 25,700 children above the age of criminal responsibility, 10, and beneath majority, 18, were found guilty of indictable offences in 2017, and a further 13,500 cautioned England and Wales has a prison population of over 75,000 (2018 estimate) and 3000 with home curfew. Around £2.7 billion is spent on the prison service of England and Wales each year.
In 2010, ATM crime cost the UK a total of £33.2 million – just over 8 percent of total card fraud. According to the British Crime Survey, 6.4 percent of plastic card users reported being victim to fraud during 2009-10.
Robberies are rising more rapidly in England and Wales than in France, but still not nearly as much as Canada or the United States. Largescale smartphones use and reduction in police patrols are blamed. After 2014 robberies rose by 33%. Police are under pressure since 21,000 officers were cut from 2010 to 2018, only 7% of robbery cases lead to a suspect being charged in 2019 while 21% lead to a charge four years before 2019.
Recorded knife crime rose by 7% from just above 41,000 in the year to June 2018 to just above 44,000 in the year to June 2019, knifepoint rapes, robberies and assaults logged by police continued to rise. Javed Khan of Barnardo's
Barnardo's is a British charity founded by Thomas John Barnardo in 1866, to care for vulnerable children. As of 2013, it raised and spent around £200 million each year running around 900 local services, aimed at helping these same group ...
said over the ONS statistics, “Knife crime is a symptom of a much wider, complex problem. Too many young people are suffering a ‘poverty of hope’, facing a future with no qualifications, no job prospects, and no role models.” Robberies rose by 11% and fraud rose by 15%, gun crime also rose to 6734 incidents. The Crime Survey for England and Wales
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (previously called the British Crime Survey) is a systematic victim study, currently carried out by Kantar Public (formally known as BMRB Ltd) on behalf of the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Curated by ...
that takes account of offences not reported to police, also show a continuing rise in fraud, it suggested 3,863,000 fraud offences occurred during the year to June 2019. The proportion of cases solved dropped from 15.5% in 2015 to 7.4% in 2019, which is a record low. Across England and Wales, the percentage of solved burglaries almost halved during the seven years preceding 2021, from 32,000 out of 342,043 cases (9.5%) in 2014-2015 to 14,000 out of 268,000 cases (5.4%) in 2021-2022.
Scotland
Scots criminal law is separate to English criminal law, including the use of a not proven
Not proven (, ) is a verdict available to a court of law in Scotland. Under Scots law, a criminal trial may end in one of three verdicts, one of conviction ("guilty") and two of acquittal ("not proven" and "not guilty").The Scottish criminal ju ...
verdict at criminal trials in the Courts of Scotland
The courts of Scotland are responsible for administration of justice in Scotland, under statutory, common law and equitable provisions within Scots law. The courts are presided over by the judiciary of Scotland, who are the various judicial o ...
. The list of offences is also different from England and Wales, and Northern Ireland.
In 2007–8, there were 114 homicide victims in Scotland, a slight decrease on the previous year. In the third quarter of 2009, there were a little over 17,000 full time equivalent serving police officers. There were around 375,000 crimes in 2008–9, a fall of 2% on the previous year. These included around 12,500 non-sexual violent acts, 168,000 crimes of dishonesty (housebreaking, theft and shoplifting are included in this category) and 110,000 acts of fire-raising and vandalism
Vandalism is the action involving deliberate destruction of or damage to public or private property.
The term includes property damage, such as graffiti and defacement directed towards any property without permission of the owner. The term ...
. In the 2008–9 period, there was a prison population in Scotland of about 7,300, equating to 142 people per 100,000 population, very similar to England and Wales. Spending on Scotland's prisons was around £350 million in 2007–8.
Northern Ireland
Between April 2008 and 2009, there were just over 110,000 crimes recorded by the Police Service of Northern Ireland
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI; ga, Seirbhís Póilíneachta Thuaisceart Éireann; Ulster-Scots: ')
is the police force that serves Northern Ireland. It is the successor to the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) after it was reform ...
, an increase of 1.5% on the previous year. Northern Ireland has around 7,500 serving full-time equivalent police positions, and a prison population of 1,500, 83 per 100,000 of the population, lower than the rest of the UK.
External links
Crime Survey for England and Wales
References
{{Use dmy dates, date=March 2020
Crime in the United Kingdom