Public spending on the police service in the United Kingdom rose to 28.8 billion British pounds in 2024/25, the highest amount spent during the provided time period. Between 2010/11 and 2013/14 the amount of public money spent on the police fell from 18.6 billion pounds to just 16.4 billion pounds, due to the austerity policies followed by the UK government at the time.

In 2025/26 the amount budgeted for gross expenditure for police services in London was approximately **** billion British pounds. As can be seen, the budget for London's police decreased by *** million GBP from **** billion GBP in 2012/13 to **** billion GBP in 2013/14. It remained around this figure in 2017/18, but increased slightly to **** billion in 2018/19, and more substantially in 2019/20 to **** billion British pounds.

London's Metropolitan Police is by far the largest police force in the United Kingdom with 34,315 officers in 2024. At 16,356 officers, the Scottish police force has the second-largest force in terms of officer numbers, followed by Greater Manchester police force, which had 8,141 officers that year. Although the Metropolitan Police are responsible for policing most of Greater London, the City of London Police force covers the historic center of London, which is around one square mile in size, and numbered 995 officers in 2024. Crime in the UK In 2023/24 there were approximately 6.66 million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, compared with 6.74 million in 2022/23, which was the highest number of crimes recorded in a reporting year since 2002/03. Although crime declined from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, there has been a noticeable increase in crimes from 2014/15 onwards. In terms of the crime rate, England and Wales had the highest in the United Kingdom, at 89.7 offences per one thousand people, compared with 55 in Scotland, and 52.3 in Northern Ireland. Cuts to policing reversed in recent years Between 2010 and 2017, the number of police officers in the UK fell from 172,000 officers to just 150,000. During this same period, the London Metropolitan Police saw officer numbers decline by around 2,000 officers. The fall in police personnel was a result of UK-wide funding cuts, during this time period, with police expenditure falling from 19.3 billion in 2009/10 to 16.35 billion by 2013/14. This policy has since been reversed, with the last UK government recruiting officers and generally spending more on the police service. As of 2024, there were 170,500 police officers in the UK, and government expenditure on the police service was 27.3 billion British pounds.

The police transformation fund is intended to transform policing by investing in digitalisation, a diverse and flexible workforce and new capabilities to respond to changing crimes and threats. This data outlines the successful bids for police transformation fund, including: the police forces and partners that have been awarded funding; the amount of funding awarded; the projects that are being funded.

Sets out the Home Secretary’s determination for 2009/10 of the aggregate amount of grants that she proposes to pay under section 46(2) of the Police Act 1996, and the amount to be paid to the Greater London Authority for the Metropolitan Police Authority.

The Home Office is publishing a series of consistent police revenue funding numbers from 1995/96-2009/10. This allows comparison of funding levels over time.

There were *** homicides for every million people in England and Wales in 2024/25, compared with 9.4 in the previous reporting year. In 2023/24, the homicide rate among UK jurisdictions was highest in Scotland, at **** homicides per million people, and lowest in Northern Ireland, which had a homicide rate of ***. Throughout this provided time period, the homicide rate for Scotland has declined substantially. From 2003/04 to 2013/14, Scotland had the highest homicide rate among UK jurisdictions, with a peak of ** homicides per million people recorded in 2004/05. Uptick in violent crimes since the mid-2010s In 2002/03, there were ***** homicides in England and Wales, but by 2013/14, this had fallen to just ***, with similar declines also evident in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Unlike in the latter two jurisdictions, however, there was a noticeable uptick in homicides in England and Wales from 2016/17 onwards, with *** recorded in 2019/20. Additionally, there has been a surge in violence against the person offences in England and Wales, rising from around ******* in 2012/13 to more than *********** ten years later in 2022/23. It is unclear what exactly is driving this trend, but in an attempt to reverse it, the UK government has started to increase the manpower and funding available to UK police forces after several years of cuts. Struggles of the UK justice system Recent boosts to police funding come after almost a decade of austerity was imposed on most public services. Although some government departments were protected from this, the Ministry of Justice saw its budget decline from *** billion pounds in 2009/10 to just **** billion pounds in 2015/16. Although the Justice Budget has also increased recently, there are several signs that the system as a whole is under pressure. There is a significant backlog of cases at Crown Courts in England and Wales, with serious offences taking an average of almost***************** to pass through the court system. Meanwhile, prisons are struggling with severe capacity issues along with upticks in violence and self-harm.

Public spending on the police in Brazil increased to 137.9 billion Brazilian reais in 2023, the highest amount spent during the forecast period. Between 2019 and 2021, the amount of public money spent on the police decreased from 120.8 billion reais to 117.3 billion reais.

In 2024/25 there were ***** kidnapping offences recorded by the police in England and Wales, a slight decrease when compared with the previous year when there were ***** offences. Kidnapping offences reached a low of ***** offences in the 2012/13 reporting year but have been increasing in almost every reporting year since then. Rising crime overall Kidnapping offences have increased at a time of rising overall crime. After declining for several years between 2003/04 and 2010/11, overall crime offences suddenly started to increase, and reached a recent peak of **** million offences in 2022/23. While the overall number of crimes has grown, UK crime rates are actually slightly lower than in the early 2000s, due to population growth. As of the most recent reporting years, the number of crimes per 1,000 people was **** in England and Wales, **** in Scotland, and **** in Northern Ireland. Money and manpower to blame? The current crime trends that are prevailing in the UK have led to questions about the ability of the police to counter it, and if they have the manpower and resources to do so. For much of the 2010s the police had cuts to their funding leading to a decline in officer numbers, although both trends have recently been reversed, with funding increasing from the late 2010s onwards. Other parts of the justice system, such as legal aid funding have not seen a reversal of this trend, with spending in 2023/24 still below that of 2010/11 in nominal terms.

The data used in the in the Annual Crime Statistics 2022 - 23 Dashboard is available here: 2022 - 2023 crime statistics | Metropolitan Police, along with the related data definitions. Please note that, this data sets is updated on the 4th of each April. Last extraction occurred April 2023.

Total Notifiable Offence (TNO) data follows the Home Office counting rules for recorded crime (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/counting-rules-for-recorded-crime ).

The “Other Crime” offence data follows the Home Office counting rules but have been grouped by specific features (e.g. Hate Crime): please see dashboard for definitions.

Measures include Offences, Sanction Detections, and the Sanction Detection Rate (total number of sanction detections divided by the total number of offences in a given period).

All data is broken down by financial year for each crime type, and can be filtered by Basic Command Unit (BCU) and Borough. NB: The Borough shown is the ‘investigating’ Borough not necessarily the Borough where the offence occurred.

Due to an internal IT deployment, from 27th February these datasets may be temporarily disrupted. Work is ongoing to rebuild these datasets.

There were ******* violent crime offences recorded by the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police Forces in London in 2024/25, a decrease when compared with the previous reporting year. From a low of ******* violent crimes in 2015/16, violent crime has increased almost every year. This reflects a pattern of increasing violent crime replicated across England and Wales as a whole, with a peak of *** million offences reported in 2022/23. Overall offences also rising The overall crime figures for London also show a trend of increasing crime in the UK capital. In 2015/16 for example, there were ******* crimes recorded in London, compared to ******* in 2024/25. This follows a similar pattern seen in England and Wales, which has witnessed an uptick in crime after reaching historic lows in the mid-2010s. In 2013/14 for example, there were approximately ** crimes per 100,000 people in England and Wales, compared with *****in 2024/25. By contrast, in Scotland, and in Northern Ireland, crimes rates have remained broadly similar to the mid-2010s. Police budgets rising again Due to the austerity policies enacted by UK governments in the 2010s, the amount the UK government spent on the police was effectively frozen between 2013/14 and 2016/17. This policy has since been reversed, with the overall UK police budget reaching **** billion pounds in 2024/25, compared with 16.4 billion in 2016/17. The amount budgeted for the Metropolitan Police by the Mayor of London for 2025/26 was **** billion British pounds, a significant increase on the **** billion budgeted in 2018/19, but slightly lower than in 2024/25.