Police recorded crime figures by Police Force Area and Community Safety Partnership areas (which equate in the majority of instances, to local authorities).

Recorded crime figures for CSP areas. Number of offences for the last two years, percentage change, and rates per 1,000 population for the latest year.

This is the tenth report in an annual series combining crimes recorded by the police and interviews from the British Crime Survey (BCS) for the financial year 2010/11. Each source has different strengths and weaknesses but together they provide a more comprehensive picture of crime than could be obtained from either series alone. Additional explanatory notes are available in the User Guide to Home Office Crime Statistics.

Longer term datasets contain https://data.gov.uk/dataset/0e26ee1b-26b7-406e-a3b1-f3481b324977/local-police-recorded-crime-data" class="govuk-link">police recorded crime for police force areas and local authorities

https://data.gov.uk/dataset/ea7a5bd4-4c26-4ea3-b1ff-c5c0dfe9fcfd/crime-in-england-and-wales-2010-11" class="govuk-link">Crimes detected in England & Wales 2010/11 reports on the levels and trends in detections and detection rates in England and Wales.

The last annual crime statistics https://data.gov.uk/dataset/df7e3554-2a62-497a-bbd6-2c3982dba5a5/crime-in-england-and-wales-2009-10" class="govuk-link">Crime in England and Wales 2009/10 was published in July 2010.

See the https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesannualsupplementarytables" class="govuk-link">Crime Survey supplementary tables on the nature of: burglary, vehicle-related theft, bicycle theft, household theft, personal and other theft and vandalism.

In 2023/24 there were 25,205 crimes against public justice recorded by the police in Scotland, with the 2020/21 figure the highest for this type of crime since 2011/12, when there were 26,635 crimes of this type recorded.

Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and Home Office police recorded crime data, by quarterly time periods.

There were 16,624 fraud crimes recorded by the police in Scotland in 2023/24, a slight fall on 2022/23, but a significant increase compared with previous reporting years, such as in 2019/20 when there were 11,939 of these offences.

There were approximately 2.01 million violence against the person crime offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2023/24, compared with almost 2.11 million offences in 2022/23. The number of recorded violent crime offences in England and Wales has increased considerably in the last decade, with just 634,600 violent crimes recorded in 2013/14. Other types of crime climbing After falling to relatively low levels in the mid-2010s, overall crime in England and Wales has been increasing at a substantial rate. From 62 crimes per 1,000 people in 2013/14, the crime rate shot up to a peak of 93.5 by 2022/23. The sharp uptick in the number of sexual offences recorded by the police accounts for part of this rise, with the number of sexual offences increasing from just over 64,000 in 2013/14 to almost 195,000 in 2022/23. While overall theft crime has gradually fallen in a similar time period, there has been a recent spike in shoplifting offences, with almost 444,000 incidents recorded in 2023/24, compared with 342,200 in 2022/23. Prisons under pressure The increase in violent and sexual crime offences, which typically result in longer sentences for offenders, has added to the problem of overcrowding at prisons in England and Wales. With prisons dangerously close to capacity in 2024, the government even released thousands of prisoners early that September. Prisons in England and Wales are also increasingly violent, for both staff and inmates, with assaults on staff reaching a high of over 2,700 incidents in the third quarter of 2024. Incidences of self-harm have also increased rapidly, from around 5,700 in early 2014 to almost 20,000 ten years later.

The crime rate in the United Kingdom was highest in England and Wales in 2023/24, at **** crimes per 1,000 people, compared with Scotland which had ** crimes per 1,000 population and Northern Ireland, at **** crimes per 1,000 people. During this time period, the crime rate of England and Wales has usually been the highest in the UK, while Scotland's crime rate has declined the most, falling from **** crimes per 1,000 people in 2002/03, to just **** by 2021/22. Overall crime on the rise In 2022/23 there were approximately **** million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, with this falling to **** million in 2023/24. Although crime declined quite significantly between 2002/03 and 2013/14, this trend has been reversed in subsequent years. While there are no easy explanations for the recent uptick in crime, it is possible that reduced government spending on the police service was at least partly to blame. In 2009/10 for example, government spending on the police stood at around **** billion pounds, with this cut to between ***** billion and ***** billion between 2012/13 and 2017/18. One of the most visible consequences of these cuts was a sharp reduction in the number of police officers in the UK. As recently as 2019, there were just ******* police officers in the UK, with this increasing to ******* by 2023. A creaking justice system During the period of austerity, the Ministry of Justice as a whole saw its budget sharply decline, from *** billion pounds in 2009/10, to just **** billion by 2015/16. Although there has been a reversal of the cuts to budgets and personnel in the justice system, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the depleted service hard in 2020. A backlog of cases grew rapidly, putting a strain on the ability of the justice system to process cases quickly. As of the first quarter of 2023, for example, it took on average *** days for a crown court case to go from offence to conclusion, compared with *** days in 2014. There is also the issue of overcrowding in prisons, with the number of prisoners in England and Wales dangerously close to operational capacity in recent months.

Summary figures for ‘no crime’ data are published by the Office for National Statistics in the User Guide to Crime Statistics.

Police forces record some crimes which are subsequently ‘no crimed’ where it is judged by the police that no crime actually took place.

The Home Office Counting Rules (HOCR) set out circumstances under which a crime report may be ‘no crimed’. These include situations where a crime is considered to have been recorded in error or where, having been recorded, additional verifiable information becomes available that determines that no crime was committed (for further information see the ‘general rules’ section of the HOCR).

‘No crimes’ relate to crimes already recorded and are therefore distinct from incident reports that are not crimed in the first place.

Crime reports that are ‘no crimed’ are removed from police crime data and thus from the police recorded crime statistics. The majority of ‘no crime’ decisions are made by police forces before data are submitted to the Home Office, and although some revisions are made to published crime statistics as a result of ‘no crimes’, these are typically small.

The Home Office routinely collects data from police forces on the number of incidents that have been recorded as crimes but have then been ‘no crimed’. A table showing the numbers and percentages of ‘no crimes’ by offence group is available (in Table UG9 of the User Guide tables) from the http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/taxonomy/index.html?nscl=Crime+in+England+and+Wales" class="govuk-link">ONS website The Home Office has made available the force level data that underpin this table.

Datasets are available below as Excel spreadsheets (.xls) and in Comma Separated Values (.csv) format.

Great care is needed in interpreting ‘no crime’ data. The proportion of ‘no crimes’ does not in itself infer high or low compliance with the overall requirements of the HOCR. Levels of ‘no criming’ are particularly susceptible to local recording practice and the IT systems in use. A police force having a high level of ‘no crimes’ may be indicative of that force having a local recording process that captures all reports as crimes at the first point of contact and before any further investigation has taken place to consider the full facts. Equally a police force with a low level of ‘no crimes’ might be indicative of a recording practice by which reports are retained as incidents only until a fuller investigation has taken place.

In 2012, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC) in their wider http://www.hmic.gov.uk/media/review-police-crime-incident-reports-20120125.pdf" class="govuk-link">review of crime and incident recording examined force ‘no crime’ processes to determine if decisions to ‘crime’ were made correctly. In HMIC’s review, which looked at a small number of ‘no crime’ decisions (less than 5,000 across England and Wales), they found that nationally the ‘no crime’ compliance rate was 87 per cent; this was 84 per cent for violent crime. The range for correct ‘no crime’ decisions was between 75 and 100 per cent across all police forces.

There were approximately 6.66 million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2023/24, compared with approximately 6.74 million in the 2022/23 reporting year. Although a slight decline on the previous reporting year, 2023/24 saw the second-highest number of crimes recorded in the provided time period, with the low number of crimes reported in 2020/21 due to the COVID-19 restrictions in place throughout that reporting year. In general, the number of crime offenses in England and Wales has been rising at a fairly rapid pace, increasing from just over four million in 2013/14, to the high seen in 2022/23. Reversing the trend after a decade of cuts The rise in crime during this period has led to serious questions about how to reverse this trend, and if the police have enough manpower and resources to counter it. Due to austerity measures pursued by British governments after 2010, police forces were forced to cut officer numbers in successive years between 2010 and 2017, resulting in a net decrease of around 22,000 officers. In more recent years, public sector expenditure on the police force has started to increase and reached 25.2 billion British pounds in 2022/23, while officer numbers reached 171,000 in 2023, the highest figure since 2010. Crime rates highest in Northern England In 2022/23, the police force area with the highest crime rate in this year was Cleveland, located in the North East of England, which had approximately 147.7 crimes per 1,000 people, compared with the England and Wales average of 93.6. Among UK regions, the three regions of Northern England; Yorkshire, the North East, and the North West, had the highest crime rates of any regions. The region of England with the lowest crime rate was the South West, at 69.9 crimes per 1,000 people.

Trends in Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) crime and Home Office police recorded crime for England and Wales, by offence type. Also includes more detailed data on crime such as violence, fraud and anti-social behaviour.

Crime data and neighbourhood policing information from all forces in England and Wales to the Public. This data is what is behind the police.uk website.

The Police API allows you to retrieve information about neighbourhood areas in all 43 English & Welsh police forces. All forces are required to keep this data accurate and up to date, so the API provides a rich and definitive data source for crime statistics at both street and neighourhood level.

The API is implemented as a standard XML REST web service using HTTP GET/POST requests.

The monthly data dumps can be downloaded using URLs structured consistently in the following format: https://data.police.uk/data/archive/[year]-[month].zip However because the data file is over 19 million rows, we also provide Custom CSV Download and JSON API helper interfaces so you can easily access subsets of the data. Generally, we recommend working with one of these interfaces instead of the full data dump.

In the 2023/24 reporting year there were estimated to have been approximately 5,400 fraud offences recorded in Northern Ireland, compared with 4,671 in the previous year.

Annual data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and metal theft offences recorded by the police, including demographic and offence type breakdowns and time series data.