There were 970 robberies recorded by the police in Wales in 2023/24, a decline on the previous reporting year. During this period, the 2019/20 reporting year was the one with the most robberies in Wales, with the fewest occurring in 2015/16, at 747.

In 2024/25, there were approximately 78,800 robbery offences reported by the police in England and Wales, compared with 81,000 in the previous year. During the provided time period, the reporting year with the highest number of robberies was 2002/03, when there were around 110,270. From 2002/03 onwards, robberies in England and Wales generally declined and reached a low of just 50,150 offences in 2014/15. Robberies increased from this year onwards, however, with 2019/20 seeing the highest number of offences since 2006/07. What types of crime are increasing? Unfortunately, the rise in robbery offences seen recently has not occurred in isolation. Overall crime in England and Wales also fell for several years prior to 2014/15 before suddenly climbing upwards and reaching over 6.74 million offences in 2022/23. Violent crime and sexual offences have both increased substantially, and while overall theft has declined, shoplifting offences reached a peak of almost 444,000 in 2023/24. This crime spike has led to a focus on the police, and if they have enough manpower and resources to reverse this trend. After the number of UK police officers was cut by around 20,000 between 2010 and 2016, the number of officers in 2023 was the most since 2010. At the same time, spending on police services was cut noticeably for the period between 2013/14 and 2016/17, with these cuts also being reversed from 2017/18 onwards. Robbery and UK justice system Robbery is considered one of the most serious criminal offences in defined as both a violent crime and a property crime. The offence carries one of the longest average prisons sentences in England and Wales, at 47.7 months, or almost four years. Serious crimes such as this would typically be tried in Crown Courts, yet as of the first quarter of 2023, there is a significant backlog of cases awaiting trial. This has led to an increasingly delayed justice system, with the average time an offence reached a conclusion in crown courts reaching 676 days in 2023, or almost two years. At the back end of the justice system, prisons are struggling with capacity issues and have been operating with very little spare capacity for several months as of 2024.

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

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.

The crime rate in Wales was ** crimes per 1,000 population in 2023/24, compared with **** in the previous year, the highest in the recorded time period.

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.

The crime rate of England and Wales in 2024/25 was ***** crimes per thousand people when fraud and computer misuse crimes were included and **** when excluded. This represented one of the highest crime rates in this time period, nonetheless a decline when compared with 2022/23, when the crime rate peaked at *****, or ****, when excluding computer fraud.

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

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.

In 2024/25, there were approximately 1.78 million theft offences recorded by police forces in England and Wales, compared with just under 3.41 million in 2002/23.

Background:
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), previously known as the British Crime Survey (BCS), has been in existence since 1981. The survey traditionally asks a sole randomly selected adult, in a random sample of households, details pertaining to any instances where they, or the household, has been a victim of a crime in the previous 12 months. These are recorded in the victim form data file (VF). A wide range of questions are then asked covering demographics and crime-related subjects such as attitudes to the police and the criminal justice system (CJS). Most of the questionnaire is completed in a face-to-face interview in the respondent's home; these variables are contained within the non-victim form (NVF) data file. Since 2009, the survey has been extended to children aged 10-15 years old; one resident of that age range has also been selected at random from the household and asked about incidents where they have been a victim of crime, and other related topics. The first set of children's data, covering January-December 2009, had experimental status, and is held separately under SN 6601. From 2009-2010, the children's data cover the same period as the adult data and are included with the main dataset. Further information may be found on the ONS Crime Survey for England and Wales web page and for the previous BCS, from the GOV.UK BCS Methodology web page.

Self-completion data:
A series of questions on drinking behaviour, drug use and intimate personal violence (including stalking and sexual victimisation) are administered to adults via a self-completion module which the respondent completes on a laptop computer. Children aged 10-15 years also complete a separate self-completion questionnaire. The questions are contained within the main questionnaire documents, but the data are not available with the main survey; they are available only under Secure Access conditions. Lower-level geographic variables are also available under Secure Access conditions to match to the survey.

History:
Up to 2001, the survey was conducted biennially. From April 2001, interviewing was carried out continually and reported on in financial year cycles and the crime reference period was altered to accommodate this change. The core sample size has increased from around 11,000 in the earlier cycles to over 40,000. Following the National Statistician's Review of Crime Statistics in June 2011 the collation and publication of Crime Statistics moved to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) from 1st April 2012, and the survey changed its name to the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) accordingly.

Scottish data:
The 1982 and 1988 BCS waves were also conducted in Scotland. The England and Wales data for 1982 and 1988 are held at the UKDA under SNs 1869 and 2706, but the Scottish data for these studies are held separately under SNs 4368 and 4599. Since 1993, separate Scottish Crime and Justice Surveys have been conducted, see the series web page for more details.

New methodology for capping the number of incidents from 2017-18
The CSEW datasets available from 2017-18 onward are based upon a new methodology of capping the number of incidents at the 98th percentile. Incidence variables names have remained consistent with previously supplied data but due to the fact they are based on the new 98th percentile cap, and old data sets are not, comparability has been lost with previous years. More information can be found in the 2017-18 User Guide and the article ‘Improving victimisation estimates derived from the Crime Survey for England and Wales’. ONS intend to publish all micro data back to 1981 with incident data based on the 98th percentile cap later in 2019.

The main CSEW 1996-2020 Secure Access dataset (SN 7280) includes:

• the adult and child data also held in the standard End User Licence (EUL) version
• adult self-completion modules on drinking behaviour, drug use, stolen goods, children's self-completion modules and sexual identity and low-level geography variables formerly held under Special Licence access conditions (please note that not all modules occur for each year - see the survey year's documentation for details)
• hate crime variables HATEMT3A-HATEMT3I and HATEPS3A-HATEPS3I from the Victim Form
• the interpersonal violence (IPV) data (comprising the modules on domestic violence, sexual victimisation and stalking)

Users who do not require access to the modules noted above should apply for the EUL version. The Secure Access version has more restrictive access conditions than the standard EUL version - see the 'Access' tab. All studies in the series can be viewed from the Crime Survey for England and Wales series webpage.

This study also includes the following low-level geography variables from 2008 onwards:

• Local Authority District
• Rural and Urban Area Classification
• Police Force Area
• ONS District Level Classification: Supergroup
• ONS District Level Classification: Group
• ONS District Level Classification: Subgroup
• Output Area Classification - Supergroup (7 categories)
• Output Area Classification - Group (21 categories)
• Output Area Classification - Subgroup (52 categories)

A further CSEW low-level geography file including variables down to Super Output Areas (Lower Layer) is available under separate Secure Access study SN 7311.

Latest edition information:
For the 12th edition (November 2023), a 'bolt-on' data file containing incident numbers for the 2011-2012 Victim Form, and an accompanying data dictionary, were added to the study.

When incidents happened, information about offenders, the victim’s perception of the incident, injuries sustained, use of weapons and if the offender was under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Annual data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).

In the 2023/24 reporting year, the number of theft crime offences per 1,000 people was 29.5 in England and Wales, with the Metropolitan Police in London reporting the highest theft crime rate among police force areas, at 50.6.

This data shows the recored crime in England and Wales for 2010-11. Crimes are listed against the police force areas and are broken down into broad categories such as crimes against persons, burglary, sexual crimes (sexual assault, rape, exposure), fraud, drugs and robbery. This data was sourced from Home Office (http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/publications/science-research-statistics/research-statistics/crime-research/hosb1011/) and then manipulated in excel and joined with Police Force areas dataset from ShareGeo (http://hdl.handle.net/10672/313) in a GIS. Data is in shapefile format. GIS vector data. This dataset was first accessioned in the EDINA ShareGeo Open repository on 2012-08-24 and migrated to Edinburgh DataShare on 2017-02-21.

In 2024/25, there were 245,284 burglaries in England and Wales, a slight decline on the previous year, when there were 266,181. Since 2002/03 there has been a clear trend of falling burglary offences, with the most recent year having the fewest burglaries in this time period.

There were approximately 6.59 million crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2024/25, compared with approximately 6.66 million in the previous reporting year. Although there was a slight decline on the previous two reporting years, 2024/25 saw the third-highest number of crimes recorded in the provided time period, with the dip in crime figures 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 increased at a fairly rapid pace from 2014 onward, rising from just over four million to a peak of 6.74 million offences in 2022/23. Reversing the trend after a decade of cuts The uptick in crime since the mid-2010s has led to serious questions about how to further reverse this trend and if the police have enough manpower and resources to counter it. Due to austerity measures pursued by the 2010 coalition government, police forces had to contend with fewer resources, leading to cuts in personnel. Between 2010 and 2017, officer numbers across the UK were reduced by 22,000 In more recent years, public sector expenditure on the police force has started to increase and reached 27.3 billion British pounds in 2023/24. As of 2024, there were around 170,500 police officers in the UK, 1,500 fewer than in 2010. Crime rates are highest in Northern England In 2024/25, the police force area with the highest crime rate in this year was Cleveland, located in the North East of England, which had approximately 122 crimes per 1,000 people, compared with the England and Wales average of 87.2. After Cleveland, the highest crime rates were reported by forces that are responsible for policing major UK cities, such as West Yorkshire Police, Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, and the Metropolitan Police in London. The areas with the lowest crime rates are typically more rural in nature, such as Wiltshire, which had the lowest crime rate in this reporting year.

There were 263,045 crimes recorded in Wales in the 2023/24 reporting year, an increase on the previous year, when there were 275,694 crime offences reported by the police in Wales.

This publication presents a range of statistics relating to crime.

Source agency: Welsh Government

Designation: National Statistics

Language: English

Alternative title: Statistical Focus on Crime in Wales

Presents the most recent crime statistics from the British Crime Survey and police recorded crime in England and Wales.