Crime in England and Wales: 2025

The latest edition of Crime in England and Wales, hot off the National Statistics press, has arrived with a dull thud on our doorstep and because you’re all probably way-too-busy Tik-Toking (or whatever “the kids” do nowadays in lieu of revision) I thought I’d do my usual Chicken Nuggets review (just the most tasty bits in easy-to-swallow mouthfuls).

However, before we get down to the nitty gritty of the highlights it’s important to point-out that you’ve probably been taught there are basically two main sources of crime data for England and Wales:

1. Police Recorded Crime (sometimes called “Official Crime Statistics”) that you will have been told lack reliability. While it’s probably not a good sign that the Government’s own Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) have repeatedly warned, since 2014, that many police forces fail to accurately record crime in their locality, steps seem to have been taken to try to address this general problem. The OSR have, for example, recently noted “Police forces are recording crime more accurately now than in 2014”.

While reliability problems do persist, it’s not simply a case pf the police massaging the figures through a range of quaint techniques, such as coughing (getting an offender to admit to multiple similar crimes), cuffing (downgrading the seriousness of an offence so the perpetrator may be charged with something less serious) and skewing (pursuing crimes that are easier to solve at the expense of crimes, such as burglary, that are difficult to solve). Police forces frequently come under pressure to prioritise crimes that “the public” find important and this can result in crime statistics reflecting increased police activity rather than a real crime trend. It’s also important to note that police recorded data is far more likely to be reliable for high-harm, low-volume crimes such as murder – which, slightly-ironically, brings us to:

2. The Crime Survey of England and Wales (formally The British Crime Survey) which, you may well have been taught, have a much higher validity than their police counterparts. This has partly come about because the CSEW has historically focused on low-harm, high-volume crimes that are much less-likely to have been reported to the police (again, for a variety of reasons, such as a lack of faith in the police’s ability to solve the crime). Again, for reasons I’ve just noted, this isn’t necessarily the case. For some forms of crime, such as homicide or car theft, official crime statistics are perfectly valid: they measure what they claim to measure, albeit for different reasons. Dead bodies, for example, are notoriously difficult to hide (and I should know) while the fact all cars need to be insured gives people an incentive to report their theft.

As you might have suspected, there is a third measure that can be used: the aforementioned Crime in England and Wales that combines data from both of the above sources. One reason for this you might find useful is that while the CSEW tends to focus on crimes against households and those over the age of 16, Police Recorded Crime includes a much wider range of offences, including those against businesses and children. Combining the two forms of data, therefore, makes sense.

More importantly perhaps, combining domestic and officially reported crime, can increase data validity. CSEW data, for example, shows that fewer than 1-in-6 (around 15%) rape victims reported their victimisation to police.

So what, you may be thinking, are the edited lowlights of this (actually last) year’s crime figures?

Crime against individuals and households has generally continued to fall over the past 10 years, although this overall decline hides a number of exceptions, such as sexual assaults, fraud and shoplifting, all of which have seen significant increases over the past year.

Headline crimes (theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse and violence) are crimes that receive more media and public interest. These showed a 14% increase (from 8.4 – 9.6 million) driven by:

• Fraud (particularly online fraud) which increased by one-third (33%) to around 4 million incidents. Increasing internet use is an obvious driver of this particular crime and one important attraction of this kind of criminal activity is its relative anonymity and very low arrest rates.

• Theft increased by 13%, mainly due to a 50% increase in theft from the person. One important driver of this type of crime is mobile phone ownership – an attractive “hot product” for thieves: they are easy to steal, have a high intrinsic value and can be relatively easily sold-on.

Domestic abuse (around 2 million current victims) has seen a gradual decline over the past decade, although sexual assaults – including those within domestic households – have increased to around 1 million current victims.

One of the problems we’ve noted about police recorded crime is that it doesn’t provide a particularly reliable measure of many forms of crime because of how different forces interpret their recording responsibilities. Over the past 10 years, in light of increased public and media criticism of how they handle sexual offences, there has been a sustained “increase” in these offences (a nearly 10% rise over the past year). This is more-likely to reflect changes in the way sexual offences are now officially recorded than a real increase in such crimes.

Where official police statistics do tend to be more reliable is in relation to low-volume, high-risk crimes such as homicide. These decreased by 5% over the year. The 535 recorded offences were the lowest since 2014 (533).

Firearms offences showed a 20% decrease.

Knife offences showed a small 2% increase.

Shoplifting offences increased by 20% to nearly half a million (450,000) offences – the highest figure since this offence was first recorded in 2003.

Two further forms of police recorded crime, vehicle offences (down 7%) and burglary (nearly 75% lower than in 2003) are relatively reliable because victims tend to be insured and therefore have a financial incentive to report their victimisation to the police.