Key Points

• In accordance with the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007, statistics based on police recorded crime data have been assessed against the Code of Practice for Official Statistics and found not to meet the required standard for designation as National Statistics. The full assessment report can be found on the UK Statistics Authority website. Data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales continue to be badged as National Statistics.
• Alongside this release, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have published a response to the UK Statistics Authority’s assessment of crime statistics, including progress on implementing the requirements set out by the Authority.
• Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimate there were 7.5 million crimes against households and resident adults in the previous twelve months, based on interviews with a nationally representative sample in the year ending December 2013. This was down 15% compared with the previous year’s survey, and is the lowest estimate since the survey began in 1981.
• The reduction of crime measured by the CSEW was driven by decreases in a range of offence groups, including: other household theft (down 25%); violence (down 22%); and vandalism (down 15%).
• The CSEW also estimated there were 762,000 crimes experienced by children aged 10 to 15 resident in the household population in the year ending December 2013. This was down 13% compared with the year ending December 2012 (877,000), although this was not a statistically significant decrease.
• The police recorded 3.7 million offences in the year ending December 2013, a decrease of 2% compared with the previous year.
• There were decreases across most of the main categories of police recorded crime. However, there are signs of increasing upward pressures in some offence types in the police recorded crime data; for example, shoplifting continued to increase (by 6% in the year ending December 2013). Continuing falls in high volume crimes such as other types of theft offences and criminal damage mean that overall levels of crime have also fallen.
• There was also a 1% increase in violence against the person offences recorded by the police but this is thought to reflect improvements in recording and possibly a rise in public reporting.
• The number of sexual offences recorded by the police increased by 17%. This continues the pattern seen in recent quarterly releases and comes in the wake of the publicity surrounding the Savile case and allegations against other celebrities which are thought to have led to a greater number of victims coming forward to report sexual offences to the police.
• In the year ending December 2013, 207,252 fraud offences were recorded by the police and Action Fraud based on reports from members of the public. This represents a volume increase of 25% compared with the previous year. This rise should be seen in the context of a move towards improved recording of fraud following a move to centralised recording by the police. In addition, there were 309,880 reports of fraud to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau from industry bodies.