Crime statistics in the United Kingdom refers to the way crime data is collected and reported in England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, which each operate separate judicial systems.
For information about UK crime itself, see Crime in the United Kingdom.
The Home Office has historical data on individual offences recorded by the police from 1898. A marked increase starting in the late 1950s and accelerating through to the 1980s led to the question of whether increases were due to changes in how crime was recorded, together with the public's growing willingness to report it. Occasional updates to police counting rules were made in the past, but the first systematic efforts to record crime consistently across all forces in the UK took place in the late 1990s against a backdrop of generally declining crime rates both nationally and around the world.
Today, there are two primary sources of statistics on crime in the UK: Police Recorded Crime (PRC) statistics collected by each regional force, and victim surveys - principally the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), with data from 1981. The CSEW is considered the preferred source for understanding longer-term crime prevalence and genuine trends across the population, while PRC is used to supplement weaknesses in its methodology for high-harm crimes.
While PRC statistics in England and Wales can be directly compared to those of Northern Ireland, they cannot be compared to that of Scotland due to the way Scottish counting rules operate.
The history of PRC statistics in the UK since the late 1990s is fundamentally that of administrative failure followed by statistical recovery. This created a dramatic, but misleading, apparent increase in police reported crime against a steady decrease in surveyed rates, both in the UK and internationally. In particular, the rise from 2002 and the surge from 4 million recorded crimes in the year ending March 2014 to 6.7 million in 2024 in England and Wales, are overwhelmingly methodological in origin. The sharpest periods of this inflation (2002-2004 and 2015–2019) also correlate directly with efforts to enforce data quality and police compliance. Since 2014, while police-reported crime statistics are no longer officially 'national statistics', efforts to bring them up to a sufficient quality to be so are on-going.
Recent changes in police reporting have also depressed positive outcome statistics as crime volumes have risen, compounding a generally negative popular perception of crime rates. Reporting improvements and changes also make direct international comparisons of crime volumes unreliable, particularly for non-homicide violent crime.
Measurement and publication
Modern police recorded crime statistics An important distinction within police-recorded crime in the UK is made between 'notifiable offences' recorded according to the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS), and police 'incidents' (non-crime). Incidents are recorded according to the National Standard for Incident Recording (NSIR) standards using the 'National Incident Category List' to provide uniformity about how the police record an incident and an opportunity to find any incidents that require recording as a notifiable offence. In 2011, 80% of calls to the police were about incidents specified on the 'National Incident Category List'.
Notifiable offences constitute official police crime statistics, while non-crime incidents are primarily used internally by police for the purposes of resource allocation, intelligence or local reporting. Incidents are also not to be confused with 'recordable offences', of which the police must keep records of the conviction/offender on the Police National Computer (PNC). However, while offences can be recordable, they may also not be notifiable. If so, they are excluded from official crime statistics. Police forces in the UK record large amounts of information internally, which often includes incidents that are not classified as either notifiable offences or recordable offences.
England and Wales
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) is the primary body responsible for publishing crime statistics for England and Wales, using data from both police reported crime and the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).
The Home Office is responsible for collecting and validating police recorded crime data from the 43 territorial police forces of England and Wales and the British Transport Police, and supplies this data to the ONS for compilation and publication.
Three other independent bodies are involved in regulation and quality assurance: His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) inspects the integrity of police recorded crime data for forces in England and Wales, auditing it with the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS) and National Incident Recording Standard (NIRS). The UK Statistics Authority (UKSA) and Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) are responsible for promoting and safeguarding the production and publication of official statistics. The OSR also assesses whether statistics meet the standards of the Code of Practice for Statistics, which determines if they can be designated as National Statistics.
In recent years, crime statistics have been made available online in various ways, for example through the Policing Services and Information website, and the London Metropolitan Polices Stats and Data website. Various third party sites that analyse and re-publish these figures are also available.
Scotland and Northern Ireland Scots criminal law is separate to English criminal law, including the use of a not proven verdict at criminal trials in the Courts of Scotland. The list of offences is also different from England and Wales, and in Northern Ireland.
Crime statistics are collected and published separately by their respective government bodies (the Scottish Government and Department of Justice in Northern Ireland), though they are also official statistics for those nations.
Crime surveys
England and Wales Since 1982, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) is an attempt to measure both the amount of crime and the impact of crime on England and Wales. These surveys collect information about the victims of crime, the circumstances surrounding the offence and the behaviour of the perpetrators. They are used to plan and measure the results of crime reduction or perception measures. In addition, they collect data about the perception of issues such as antisocial behaviour and the criminal justice system.
Other crime surveys include the Commercial Victimisation Survey, which covers small and medium-sized businesses, and the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey, with a particular focus on young people.
Limitations
Scotland and Northern Ireland Police recorded crime statistics in Scotland are collected according to Scots law on the basis of the Scottish Crime Recording Standard (SCRS), introduced in 2004. Crime statistics for England and Wales are not directly comparable with those in Scotland due to the SCRS following a practice called 'subsuming.' This generally means a single incident can be recorded as multiple crimes if different crimes occurred during a continuous action. In England and Wales, only the most serious crime is counted for statistical purposes (known as the "Principal Crime Rule").
The practice of 'subsuming', and other differences between the SCRS and the NCRS means crime statistics between Scotland and England and Wales are not directly comparable.
The legal system in Northern Ireland is based on that of England and Wales, and the Police Service for Northern Ireland (PSNI) has the same notifiable offence list for recorded crime as used in England and Wales. In addition, the PSNI has adopted the National Crime Reporting Standards and Home Office Counting Rules for recorded crime that apply in England and Wales.
The Scottish Crime and Justice Survey and Northern Ireland Crime Survey have similar purposes to the CSEW.
Other sources of data Various sources of supplementary data on crime and crime outcomes are also available. These are used to compare, validate and predict trends in various types of crime.
Examples include NHS admissions data for 'sharp objects', using the ICD-10 cause code X99 for 'assault by sharp object", recorded since 2017. This is compiled from Finished Admission Episodes (FAEs) within NHS hospitals in England and Wales, and is broken down by age group, gender, police force, and ethnicity. These figures are often quoted by the ONS in relation to statistics on knife crime.
Police outcomes can be analysed from criminal justice statistics to see how police deal with crimes, such as with arrests, cautions, and other out-of-court disposals. Data is collected on defendants prosecuted, offenders convicted, and remand decisions as well as the types of sentences handed out by courts.
Specialist agencies also gather information on specific areas of crime. For example, the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) collates fraud data from Report Fraud (the national fraud reporting centre that records incidents of fraud directly from the public and organisations), Cifas (a UK-wide fraud and financial crime prevention service) and UK Finance (which collects information on fraud from the card payments industry in the UK).
History of changes to counting rules
Overview There have been distinct phases of discontinuity in police recorded crime statistics in the UK:
1898 to twentieth century - Reliant mainly on reports by the public, with variations between regional forces using occasionally updated but poorly-enforced counting rules. 1950s onwards - Marked increases in crime accelerating through subsequent decades, leading to questions about these rises and the establishment of the Birish Crime Survey (now the Crime Survey for England and Wales) in 1982. 1998 - A review of counting rules provided greater guidance on crime recording, which in turn produced a rise in the number of many offences while trends in the CSEW moved consistently downward. 2002 - Introduction of the National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS): This mandatory introduction of victim-centric recording created a discrete step-change, initially estimated at 23% inflation for violence categories. 2015 - 2019 integrity correction: The longest and largest period of inflation; the loss of 'national statistics' accreditation and the ensuing mandatory police compliance following the exposure of 20% institutional under-recording. 2020 onwards - Continuous, granular adjustments to counting rules bringing about both inflation and deflation within specific categories, tending to mask a stable underlying prevalence.
History
See also Timeline
For the first half of the twentieth century, official crime statistics in England and Wales were low. During the first two decades of the century, police recorded an average of only 90,000 indictable offences each year - approximately 250 crimes per 100,000 people in 1901. Officers had considerable autonomy, having originally been given discretion in whether they thought a crime had been committed or not. Crime later began a steep rise, with an average of over one million crimes recorded each year in the 1960s, increasing to two million during the 1970s, and 3.5m in the 1980s.
Various factors contributed to the increases: changes to the types of offences recorded as crime, how they were counted, the behaviour of the public in reporting crimes to the police, and social change. For example, the relatively recent need to inform the police in order to make an insurance claim for burglary; new technologies creating new opportunities for misdemeanours; a growth in the value of ordinary people's personal property, and the criminalisation of drug use.