Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps she has taken to reduce the rate of burglaries.

We welcome the latest Crime Survey for England and Wales data, which shows a 51% per cent fall in the level of domestic burglary when comparing the Crime Survey to year ending December 2022 with the year ending March 2010. This represents a fall from 917,000 incidents to 449,000 incidents. While this is clearly good news, the Government recognises the significant impact invasive crimes such as domestic burglary can have on individuals and the wider community, and we are keen that the number of these crimes is driven even lower.

As we made clear in the Beating Crime Plan, evidence-based and targeted interventions, such as the Safer Streets Fund, underpinned by getting the basics in policing right, lies at the heart of our strategy to reduce these crimes.

The Safer Streets Fund supports police and local authorities investment in street lighting, home security and other measures, to help prevent crimes such as domestic burglary from happening in the first place.

In her open letter to police leaders in September 2022, the Home Secretary made it clear that the public will want to know the police will visit them when a burglary has been committed. We therefore welcome the announcement made by the National Police Chiefs’ Council on the 8 June that all 43 police forces in England and Wales have been implementing this policy since March this year. We are working with police leaders to ensure forces are making their attendance data available to the public. https://news.npcc.police.uk/releases/police-now-attending-scene-of-every-home-burglary

To help ensure the police have the resources they need to fight crime and tackle anti-social behaviour, we have delivered on our commitment to recruit 20,000 additional police officers by the end of March this year.