Yesterday, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) published its annual report on crime in England and Wales. This combines data on crimes reported to the police and the Crime Survey for England and Wales to produce the best estimate of how much crime is being committed. It makes for grim reading. While overall crime is up 10 per cent, some offences have soared. Robbery is up from an estimated 60,000 incidents last year to an estimated 139,000 this year, although the ONS say they prefer to use the police reported figures for robbery which show a rise of 6 per cent, from 77,106 to 81,931. Meanwhile, violence with injury is estimated to have risen from 376,000 to 562,000 (a 49 per cent increase). Shoplifting has risen by 29 per cent to reach a record high, of 469,788 offences.
The problem is that our police do not in any functional sense solve crime
It’s important to recognise that many of these crime levels are low in historic terms, especially when compared to the 1990s. The ONS also mentions that some of these increases may represent a return to the norm after the significant drop in many crimes during the Covid pandemic. As this data covers the year ending in June, it neatly takes us to the end of the Conservative government, something which Diana Johnson, minister for crime, policing and fire, was keen to draw attention to, saying ‘today’s statistics show the scale of the challenge we have inherited…too many town centres have been decimated by record levels of shoplifting, and communities have been left shaken by rising levels of knife crime…this cannot continue.’
She’s right, but the problem is that our police do not in any functional sense solve crime. Only 5.5 per cent of all crimes where there is a victim result in a charge. Perhaps the police are making liberal use of cautions and other non-charge resolutions? Not really. Of the almost four and a half million ‘outcomes assigned’ to victim-based crimes, about 250,000 resulted in a charge or summons, and around 100,000 were resolved out of court. That means just under 8 per cent of all offences result in a charge or some other resolution. Of the rest, in almost 2 million cases the police couldn’t identify a suspect, while in around 1.7 million instances ‘evidential difficulties’ of one kind or another prevented further action. These numbers have actually improved slightly in the last year. In the previous year only 4.8 per cent of victim-based crimes resulted in a charge.
What this means in practice is that the average criminal has less than a 10 per cent chance of being caught and facing consequences for a crime they commit. The Home Office were keen to point out that charges for shoplifting have increased significantly (by 56 per cent), but this leads to the next problem. Our court backlog is huge, our prisons are likely to be full again by the spring, and our jails produce a desperately high level of reoffending. In these circumstances it’s easy to see why acquisitive crime is rising. If they’re unlikely to be caught, and the jails are full so they probably won’t serve much, if any time, then of course robbers and thieves will continue their grim work, creating thousands of victims every day.
So, the government faces a huge challenge. Johnson’s promise to ‘restore neighbourhood policing across the country’ and ‘put thousands more dedicated officers out on our streets’ is to be welcomed, as is the commitment to ‘scrap the £200 shoplifting threshold’ under which ‘low-value’ shoplifting is treated more leniently. It remains to be seen whether Rachel Reeves will provide the additional funding for additional police officers, or these neighbourhood cops will simply be reassigned from other duties (potentially impacting the crime solving rate).
Meanwhile, David Gauke’s Sentencing Review is getting to work, and expected to report in the spring. This is likely to recommend a significant shift away from imprisonment. A points-based system for earlier release and greater use of home curfews or ‘house arrest’ has been hinted at.
And this is where the tension lies. Voters want crime to come down. No one wants to live in towns and cities blighted by violence, robbery, knife crime and shoplifting. This means the government needs to increase and improve policing, making sure that more criminals are identified, caught and brought to justice. The Home Office is clearly focused on this task, and will be seeking to increase the number of criminals charged and successfully prosecuted. Meanwhile the Ministry of Justice is trying to find some way to keep things functioning until the sentencing review bears fruit. In crude terms successful policing will create even more pressure on our broken Justice system. Without significantly greater funding, more court days and more capacity in both prison and probation, it is very hard to see how Labour can bring crime back down.