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FactCheck: has Labour got the best crime record of the century?

By Channel 4 News

Updated on 30 July 2008

Foreign Secretary David Miliband claims crime has fallen more under the present Labour government than at any time in the past century.

The claim

"Crime has fallen more in the past 10 years than at any time in the past century."
David Miliband, Foreign Secretary, The Guardian, 30 July 2008

The background

As rumours swirl about a Labour decapitation, an article in today's Guardian by touted leadership contender David Miliband has only heightened the speculation.

In his passionate defence of Labour's achievements and the need for change - with no mention made of Gordon Brown - the foreign secretary made a number of familiar and less familiar claims.

One in particular attracted our attention: that thorny old issue of crime statistics.

Figures out earlier this month showed crime has fallen over the past year, despite the recent concern over knife crime.

But has the last, Labour-led decade really seen the biggest fall in crime in recent history - and if so, can Labour take the credit?

There are two ways of measuring crime. The British Crime Survey, which we'll come to in a moment and asks people about their experiences of crime, has only been around since 1981. So let's look first at recorded crime.

This is just what it says on the tin: crimes reported to, and recorded by, the police. So what is counted as a crime can, and does, change over time. For example, changes introduced in 1998 and 2002 to encourage a more victim-oriented, rather than offence-oriented, method both led to an apparent increase in crime.

It's worth bearing this in mind, but most of the twentieth century still saw a rise in reported crime. Back in 1900, there were a mere 2.4 chargeable offences per 1,000 people in England and Wales. By 1954, when the rise really started to kick in, the figure had crept up to 9.7. By 1992, there were 109.4 offences.

And it's that year, 1992, that brings many a Labour crime claim down from the spin with a bump.

Recorded crime started to fall from the 1992 peak. So the fall started back in the early nineties, when Michael "prison works" Howard was home secretary, Gordon Brown was a mere shadow chancellor and Miliband was almost a decade off being elected an MP.

Was the fall the fastest in the last decade? It's hard to compare recorded crime rates right over the past 15 years because of changes in the way crime has been reported. But we can compare things on a slightly shorter time period.

For the last five years of the Tory administration, from the 1992 peak year to 1997, total recorded crimes dropped from 5,591,717 to 4,598,357 - a decrease of 17.7 per cent.

From 2002-03 to 2007-08, the past five years of the Labour government, crimes as measured on a different reporting standard have fallen from 5,974,960 to 4,950,671 - a decrease of 17.1 per cent.

Not much of a difference at all. We can also compare these figures with BCS data, the government's preferred measure.

This shows crime to be far more prevalent than the offences which are recorded to the police, although it doesn't cover certain types of crime, such as murder or rape, and it excludes those in prison and the under-16s.

The BCS showed crime rising between 1981 and 1995, when it started to fall in every survey until 2004-5.

In 1995, the survey showed 19,351,000 incidents; the next survey, in 1997, showed just 16,712,000 - a 13.6 per cent decrease - and in 1999 it fell to 15,015,000, a further 10.2 per cent drop.

Crime continued to fall until 2004-5, when 10,850,000 incidents were recorded. This increased to 11,287,000 in 2006-7, before falling by 10.1 per cent to 10,143,000 in 2007-8.

The verdict

Crime has decreased more in the past 15 or so years (depending on which set of stats you look at) than at any other time since records began.

But that's because crime rose throughout much of the twentieth century, so it was falling from a historically high base.

It's questionable how much of this Miliband can claim credit for. Recorded crime fell for the past five years at the same rate as it did under the last five years of the Conservative government - if anything, the fall under the Tories was a smidgen faster.

The useful comparator, the BCS, shows crime has dropped by almost half (47.6 per cent) since 1995. But this fall started - pretty dramatically - under the Tories.

Although things continued to fall under Labour, the biggest sustained falls occurred at the start of their term, with the recent picture showing crime to stay more steady and in fact increasing in some years.

FactCheck rating: 3.5

How ratings work

Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.

The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.

In the unlikely event that we award a 5 out of 5, our factcheckers have concluded that the claim under examination has absolutely no basis in fact.

The sources

A century of change, House of Commons library
Crime in England and Wales 2007-8
British Crime Survey statistics (.xls)
Home office recorded crime statistics
A summary of recorded crime data for 1898 to 2001-2 (.xls)
A summary of recorded crime data for 2002-3 to 2007-8 (.xls)
FactCheck: more police, less crime?

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