Crime in England and Wales, Year Ending December 2014

23 Apr 2015 12:52 PM

Main points

• Latest figures from the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) showed that, for the offences it covers, there were an estimated 6.9 million incidents of crime against households and resident adults (aged 16 and over) in England and Wales. This is a 7% decrease compared with the previous year’s survey, and 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.
• While the estimate of all CSEW crime was lower than the previous year, the apparent falls seen in most individual crime types were not statistically significant compared with the previous year. The only major category to show a statistically significant fall was theft offences which decreased by 7%.
• In contrast to the CSEW, there was a 2% increase in police recorded crime compared with the previous year, with 3.8 million offences recorded in the year ending December 2014. The renewed focus on the quality of crime recording is thought to have led to improved compliance with national recording standards, leading to proportionally more crimes reported to the police being recorded by them.
• Improved compliance with recording standards is thought to have particularly affected the police recorded crime categories of violence against the person (up 21%) and public order offences (up 14%). These rises were largely off-set by falls in the number of recorded theft offences (down 5%).
• Total sexual offences rose by 32% with the numbers of rapes (26,703) and other sexual offences (53,559) being at the highest level ever recorded since the introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) in 2002/03. As well as improvements in recording, this is also thought to reflect a greater willingness of victims to come forward to report such crimes.
• There was an increase in the volume of offences recorded by Action Fraud (9% year-on-year), although it is still 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.

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