3m Crimes A Year ‘Left Out Of Official Figures’

A fresh row over the government’s crime statistics broke out last night after two criminologists said the authoritative British Crime Survey excludes 3 million offences a year.

Prof Ken Pease, former acting head of the Home Office’s police research group, and Prof Gary Farrell of Loughborough University said the BCS underestimated the number of crimes committed against repeat victims.

They say the survey, which is based on the crime experiences of 40,000 people each year, caps at five offences the number of times victims can report they have been targeted.

“If people are victimised in the same way by the same perpetrators more than five times in a year, the number of crimes is put down at five,” the two criminologists say.

“The justification for this was ‘to avoid extreme cases distorting the rates’ but if the people who say they suffered 10 incidents really did, it is capping the series at five that distorts the rate.”

Farrell and Pease estimate that 3 million crimes have been left out of the BCS as a result. The most recently published BCS report aid there were 6.8 million “household” crimes, including burglary and thefts, and a further 4.1 million “personal” crimes, such as assault and robbery.

The pamphlet, published today by the right-of-centre thinktank Civitas, also claims that violent crime increases by 82% if the cap on repeat victimisation is lifted, rising from 2.4 million offences to 4.4 million.

David Davis, shadow home secretary, said: “It is long past time the government answered our calls to have crime statistics recorded and published independent of the Home Office. We can’t begin to tackle crime if we don’t measure it properly.

“We have long pointed out that the BCS is not a satisfactory method of recording crime.”

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said it was “obvious that the official statistics on crime do not paint the full picture”.

The Home Office said the BCS was the most reliable and robust measure of crime in England and Wales. A spokeswoman said: “The simple fact is that crime has fallen by 35% since 1997.

“The method for estimating the number of crimes experienced by British Crime Survey respondents in this paper is different from that used by Home Office statisticians but it is not necessarily a better one.

“We are confident that trends in crime are largely unaffected by this aspect of the methodology. What is important is measuring trends consistently and applying a consistent methodology over time.”