The claim
“According to the British Crime Survey, violence, theft and robbery are going up – the fastest rise in a decade”
Labour leader Ed Miliband, 2 April 2012
The background
Launching Labour’s local election campaign today, Ed Miliband homed in on everyday issues such as living standards, the NHS, jobs and crime.
He said the Tories had broken their promise of a stronger society and had made the wrong choices – including taking police off the streets.
There’s no denying the smaller number of bobbies on the beat, but how much of an effect has it had on crime? FactCheck investigates.
The analysis
There are two measures of crime in England and Wales; ‘police-recorded crime’ and the British Crime Survey (BCS).
Police-recorded crime tots up the number of incidents that the police responded to or noted down. The problem with this measure is that not everyone reports a crime.
The British Crime Survey meanwhile asks around 45,000 people about their experiences of crime in the past year, regardless of if they reported it or not. It’s not perfect (it omits under-16s and students, for example) but it is considered a better measure of crime trends in crime over time because it isn’t affected by changes in crime policy or the way police measure recorded crimes.
However, as the BCS only surveys a small, representative number of the population, its results are multiplied to gain an estimate of the population as a whole – and because it’s only an estimate it has a margin of error which the BCS puts at -5 or +5 per cent.
If the number recorded falls within that margin of error on the survey, then it won’t be considered “statistically significant”.
This means that even if the figures do show a rise or a fall in certain crimes; it might not be significant.
So what did the latest BCS survey show?
Overall, the BCS found that in the year to September 2011 there was “no statistically significant change” in the number of crimes compared with the previous 12 months.
That said, the survey found that all categories of crime in England and Wales went up except for bicycle theft and vandalism. Violence is up by 9 per cent, theft from the person is up by 12 per cent and burglary (there is no ‘robbery’ category) is up by 5 per cent.
The verdict
Mr Miliband is technically right to say these three crimes are all “up”. Yet it’s worth pointing out that none of the rises were deemed “statistically significant” by BCS statisticians – as none of them fell outside the margin of error.
In fact, the only crime that recorded a “statistically significant” change was vandalism – which was down 7 per cent between September 2010 and September 2011.
The Home Office therefore told FactCheck: “Quarterly the will be some apparent increases but they are not statistically significant so they can’t be said to be increases.”
But as for Mr Miliband’s reference to the three crimes experiencing the “fastest rise in a decade”. He was talking about personal crime, which includes theft and violence on the street among other things – as opposed to “household crime”.
Grouped together, personal crime did show a “statistically significant” rise of 11 per cent – and this is the biggest increase recorded in the last decade.
As for crime across the board, BCS trend data shows that the fastest rise in the last decade came between 2006-07 and 2007-08. Over that time period, the total number of crimes recorded by the BCS jumped 4.4 per cent to 10,446,000 crimes – while in the year to 2010-11 the number of crimes rose 1.2 per cent; to 9,618,000.
By Emma Thelwell
