The crime rate in the United Kingdom was highest in England and Wales in 2023/24, at 89.7 crimes per 1,000 people, compared with Scotland which had 55 crimes per 1,000 population and Northern Ireland, at 52.3 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 93.4 crimes per 1,000 people in 2002/03, to just 52.3 by 2021/22. Overall crime on the rise In 2022/23 there were approximately 6.74 million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, with this falling to 6.66 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 19.3 billion pounds, with this cut to between 17.58 billion and 16.35 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 150,000 police officers in the UK, with this increasing to 171,000 by 2023. A creaking justice system During the period of austerity, the Ministry of Justice as a whole saw its budget sharply decline, from 9.1 billion pounds in 2009/10, to just 7.35 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 676 days for a crown court case to go from offence to conclusion, compared with 412 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.

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

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

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.

There were approximately 2.01 million violent crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2023/24, compared with almost 2.11 million offences in the previous reporting period.

Numbers of recorded offences, and rates of offences per thousand population, by broad crime grouping, by financial year and borough.

Rate is given as per thousand population, and are calculated using mid-year population from the first part of the financial year eg For Financial year 2008-09, mid-year estimates for 2008 are used.

Offences: These are confirmed reports of crimes being committed. All data relates to "notifiable offences" - which are designated categories of crimes that all police forces in England and Wales are required to report to the Home Office
Crime rates are not available for Heathrow due to no population figures

Monthly crime data by borough and ward is available from the Met Police website, available around one month after month end.

The total number of recorded crimes per month is also shown. A fuller breakdown by 32 different types of crime is available on the MPS website.

There were changes to the police recorded crime classifications from April 2012. Therefore caution should be used when comparing sub-groups of crime figures from 2012/13 with earlier years.

Action Fraud have taken over the recording of fraud offences on behalf of individual police forces. This process began in April 2011 and was rolled out to all police forces by March 2013. Due to this change caution should be applied when comparing data over this transitional period and with earlier years.

Link to data on Met Police website.

Crime stats on ONS website

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.

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.

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.

Firearms, knife- and sharp-instrument offences, offences involving a corrosive substance, hospital admissions for assault with sharp objects, fraud, offences flagged as domestic abuse-related, corruption, anti-social behaviour, perceptions, and non-notifiable incidents.

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.

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 Rates of offences per thousand population, by broad crime grouping, by financial year for wards.

Offences: These are confirmed reports of crimes being committed. All data relates to "notifiable offences" - which are designated categories of crimes that all police forces in England and Wales are required to report to the Home Office.

Ward data should not be aggregated to give a borough or London total. This is because a small percentage (less than 5%) of crimes in this dataset have not been geocoded to a ward. Therefore total numbers and rates are indicative only, and are not an exact measure at ward level.

The rate is calculated using ward GLA 2012-based (SHLAA) population projections, and population data calculated and constrained to 2012 Borough (SHLAA) projections.

The London figure only includes the Met Police area, not the City of London.

The London total includes all offences in the Met Police Area including those that could not be geocoded. Therefore the London total will not equal the sum of the wards.

Some ward boundaries changed in 2014. From 2013/14 the data shown is for the new boundaries. This only affects Hackney, Kensington and Chelsea, and Tower Hamlets.

Action Fraud have taken over the recording of fraud offences on behalf of individual police forces. This process began in April 2011 and was rolled out to all police forces by March 2013. Due to this change caution should be applied when comparing data over this transitional period and with earlier years.

Data by detailed crime group and month are available from the MPS website.

This dataset provides police recorded crime counts and related resident population estimates for all violence and burglary (housebreaking in Scotland) (data on burglary and violence is provided separately) for the financial years 2004-5 to 2015-16. This is a longitudinal data set with data aggregated by year to financial years (1st April in one year to 31st March in following year) for the years 2004-5 to 2015-16 inclusive. Data runs from 1st April 2004 as this is the date from which all nations had national crime recording standards for police recorded crime. The dataset has been prepared to provide comparative data at the regional level - in this case - local authority districts for Scotland, and Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) as at 2015-16 in England and Wales. Data for England and Wales are directly comparable. As Scotland, and England and Wales, have different legal systems, and different police crime recording standards, the recorded crime definitions of violence and burglary (housebreaking) used here aim to provide the best available comparable data between the countries, but precise definitions of violence and burglary (housebreaking) used in the Scottish, and the English and Welsh, legal systems are not the same. Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs), previously also called Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships, are comprised of one or more English or Welsh district or unitary local authorities. Over time, some CSPs have merged and / or added additional local authorities to the partnership, this may also lead to change of partnership name. The CSPs used here are those current as listed in Home Office open data tables on recorded crime for 2015-16 (downloaded in February 2017). Police recorded crime data are data reported to and recorded by the police. Not all crimes are reported to the police, and not all reported crime are subsequently recorded. Data used from England Wales to derive this dataset do not have National Statistics status, this was withdrawn in January 2014. Data for Scotland had National Statistics status withdrawn in July 2014 but reinstated in September 2016. These data are derived entirely from open data as defined in the Open Government Licence version 3 (OGL3).

The Applied Quantitative Methods Network (AQMeN) Phase II is a Research Centre that aims to develop a dynamic and pioneering set of projects to improve our understanding of current social issues in the UK and provide policy makers and practitioners with the evidence to build a better future. Three principal cross-cutting research strands will exploit existing high-quality data resources: Education and Social Stratification will focus on social class differences in entry to, progression in and attainment at tertiary education and how they affect individuals' labour market outcomes and their civic participation; Crime and Victimisation will explore the dramatic change in crime rates in Scotland and other jurisdictions and examines the determinants and impact of criminal careers amongst populations of offenders; and Urban Segmentation and Inequality which will create innovative new measures of social segmentation and combine these with cutting-edge longitudinal and sorting-model techniques to explore the causes of neighbourhood segmentation, household location choice and neighbourhood inequalities. Five additional projects will focus on the referendum on Scottish independence, location dynamics and ethnicity and exploiting existing datasets. The research will fed into training activities and knowledge exchange events aimed at boosting capacity in quantitative methods amongst the UK social science community.

The crime rate of England and Wales in 2023/24 was 110.5 crimes per thousand people, when fraud and computer misuse was included and 89.7 when it was excluded. This represents one of the highest crime rates in this time period, and a significant increase when compared to the mid-2010s.