Crime in England and Wales, Year Ending September 2014

22 Jan 2015 03:16 PM

Key points

• Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) show that, for the offences it covers, there were an estimated 7.0 million incidents of crime against households and resident adults (aged 16 and over) in England and Wales. This represents an 11% decrease compared with the previous year’s survey, and is the lowest estimate since the CSEW began in 1981.
• The CSEW covers a broad range of victim based crimes and includes crimes which do not come to the attention of the police. Decreases were evident for almost all crime types compared with the previous year; including vehicle-related theft and criminal damage (both falling by 15%) and other household theft (down 9%).
• In contrast, police recorded crime shows no overall change from the previous year, with 3.7 million offences recorded in the year ending September 2014.
• The renewed focus on the quality of crime recording is likely to have prompted improved compliance with national standards, leading to more crimes being recorded than previously. This is thought to have particularly affected the police recorded figures for violence against the person (up 16%), public order offences (up 10%) and sexual offences (up 22%).
• The numbers of rapes (24,043) and other sexual offences (48,934) are the highest recorded by the police since 2002/03. As well as improvements in recording, this is thought to reflect a greater willingness of victims to come forward to report such crimes.
• There was an increase in the volume of fraud recorded (5% year on year), though it is difficult to judge to what extent this was affected by the transfer in responsibility of recording fraud offences from individual police forces to Action Fraud, or reflected an increase in public reports or a rise in actual criminality. It is thought that levels of fraud are substantially under-reported and thus these figures simply provide a measure of such offences brought to the attention of the authorities.

Get all the tables for this publication in the data section of this publication.