Britain’s most senior police officers have clashed with national statisticians over whether the long-term decline in crime in England and Wales is coming to an end.
The clash has been fuelled by the latest set of official figures, which showed a 13% increase in police-recorded crime in the 12 months to June, including 20% rises in gun, knife and other serious violence.
The crime survey of England and Wales, which measures people’s experience of crime, estimated that overall crime had fallen by 9% over the same period.
The debate matters because it is widely expected that the chancellor, Philip Hammond, will order a fresh public spending squeeze in his budget later this month, while police and opposition politicians say it would be irresponsible not to boost police budgets at a time of rising crime and an unprecedented terrorist threat.
Sara Thornton, the chair of the national police chiefs’ council, was clear on Wednesday that the 13% rise in police-recorded crime should be seen as a major shift and not a blip.
“I have been a chief constable for 10 years, and for all that time the crime survey of England and Wales has shown reductions from its peak in 1995. And the crime survey is still showing a 9% reduction this year if, and only if, we exclude 5m online crimes,” she told a joint summit of chief constables and crime commissioners.
“Recorded crime has increased by 13% in the past year,” she said. “And I think that most would agree that some of that is due to the requirement to record more lower level crimes such as harassment and assault without injury, but there are also very worrying signs about the increase nationally in violent crime. Knife crime, gun crime and serious violence have all increased significantly.”
Thornton said she didn’t know whether this was “the beginning of the end of the great crime decline”, but argued that the police couldn’t take any risks. “I don’t know that answer,” she said. “But I do not think that we can risk viewing the rise in recorded crime as a blip. In the way that experts say there has been a shift rather than a spike in the terrorist threat, I think that we are seeing a shift rather than a blip in crime.”
Her view was disputed in a special Office of National Statistics blogpost by Iain Bell, the deputy national statistician, who argued that while there have been genuine increases in crimes such as knife crime, burglary and vehicle theft, much of the 13% rise in police-recorded crime reflected greater recording by the police.
He agreed that when estimates of online crime are added to the official survey data shortly it was likely the existing headline figure would double.
“It is likely, then, that some of the fall in crime as measured through the survey is due to a switch in types of criminal activity to online, but even allowing for this the headline measure from the survey peaked in 1995, 8.4m above the estimate which now includes online fraud,” he said. “This peak was long before internet use became widespread. So taking the long view, crime is clearly falling.”
Indicative ONS data shows that the current crime survey headline estimate of 5.8m offences in England and Wales would rise to 10.7m when online crime is included. This would wipe out all the falls seen in the crime survey since 2004 and reinforces Thornton’s decision to question whether crime has stopped falling.
Bell’s argument appears to imply that the crime survey figures may show a rise year on year when the estimates of online crime are finally included, but the long-term trend will still amount to a fall in crime until the moment when they match the 1995 peak of 18m offences.
When online crime is included in the survey’s figures it will certainly wipe out the 38% drop in the crime survey’s figures since 2010, referenced by the home secretary, Amber Rudd, to justify her rebuke to the police over their lobbying for extra funding when there is an uptick in the crime stats.
Rudd was careful to acknowledge, however, that there had been genuine increases in homicides, knife crime and gun offences, the kind of high-harm but low-volume crimes that cause the public the most alarm.
