There were approximately 1.94 million violence against the person crime offences recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2024/25, compared with almost 2.01 million offences in the previous reporting year. The number of recorded violent crime offences in England and Wales has increased considerably in the last decade, with only around 600,000 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.

Rape offences have increased dramatically in England and Wales since 2012/13, when there were just over 16,000 offences. After this year, rape offences increased substantially, reaching a peak of 71,670 in 2024/25, the most recent reporting year. When 2024/25 is compared with 2002/03, there has been an almost sixfold increase in the number of rape offences recorded by the police in England and Wales. Similar patterns in Scotland and Northern Ireland While there has also been an increase in the number of rape and attempted rape offences in Scotland, the increase has not been quite as steep, with offences reaching 2,459 in 2022/23 compared with 924 in 2002/03. In Northern Ireland there has been a sharp rise in overall sexual offences, rising from 1,438 in 2002/03, to 4,232 by 2022/23. This rise in overall sexual offences is also observable in Scotland, with 15,049 offences in 2022/23, compared with 6,623 in 2002/03. Explaining the increase Although overall crime has shown a noticeable uptick recently, the rise in sexual offences has been much more pronounced. Rather than falling in the mid-2010s and then rising again towards the end of the decade, like overall crime, sexual offences remained at a relatively stable figure, until 2013/14 when it increased dramatically, a pattern mirrored in both Scotland and Northern Ireland. This is possibly due to better reporting practices by the police as well as an increasing willingness of victims to come forward, including historic victims of sexual violence.