Crimes of Violence

(asked on 9th January 2020) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made of the trends in the level of violent crime in the UK; and if she will make a statement.


Answered by
Kit Malthouse Portrait
Kit Malthouse
This question was answered on 14th January 2020

Data collected by police forces in England and Wales shows that there has been an increase in rates of robbery, knife possession, offences with a knife or sharp instrument and offences involving violence against an individual. See table below for exact statistics:

Published data - Selected violent offences[1] recorded by the police in England and Wales:

% change year to June 2019 compared with:

England & Wales

Year to June 2010

Year to June 2018

Year to June 2019

Year to June 2010

Year to Mar 2018

Robbery

74,888

79,164

87,361

17

10

Homicide

628

719

681

8

-5

Knife possessions

10,652

18,879

22,962

116

22

Violence against the person offences

693,632

1,469,727

1,655,146

139

13

Offences with a knife or sharp instrument excluding West Midlands, Sussex and Greater Manchester Police[2] [3]

27,319

37,281

39,504

45

6

[1] The selected offences are: homicide, attempted murder, threats to kill, assault with intent to cause serious harm, assault with injury, & robbery.

[2] West Midlands and Sussex police force included unbroken bottle and glass offences in their returns prior to year ending March 2011 but have excluded these offences in line with other forces since then. As such, they need to be excluded when comparing with years prior to 2010/11.

[3] Data from Greater Manchester Police are excluded. This force reviewed their recording of knife or sharp instrument offences in December 2017. This revealed that they were under-counting these offences. Following this review, there has been a sharp increase in the number of knife or sharp instrument offences recorded by GMP in 2018 compared with previous years. Previous data have not been revised and the data are therefore not comparable. Due to this, data from GMP have been excluded from the table.

About half the rise in knife/gun crime and robbery is thought to be due to improvements in police recording. However, we know from our analysis of the drivers of serious violence that the drugs market is also a major factor contributing to the increase in the rates of these crimes.

Violent crime has a devastating impact on victims, families and the wider community. That is why we are giving the police the resources and tools they need to keep families, communities and our country safe; this includes recruiting 20,000 new police officers and making it easier for them to use stop and search powers.

Funding for policing is also increasing by £1 billion this year, including council tax and the £100million Serious Violence Fund. This Fund is providing the critical investment needed in the 18 police forces worst affected by serious violence; such as providing £63.4 million towards surge operational activity, such as increased patrols, and £1.6 million to help improve the quality of data on serious violence, particularly knife crime, to support planning and operations. £35 million was invested in Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) which form a key component of our action to prevent violence by understanding its root causes. A further £35 million has been announced for VRUs for 2020/21.

We are also bringing forward the Serious Violence Bill which will aim to prevent and reduce serious violence by creating a new duty (and extending an existing duty) on public sector bodies to collaborate and plan with each other to prevent and reduce serious violence.

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