THE COST OF CRIME - The TaxPayers' Alliance

Table 1: Estimates of the economic and social costs of different types of
crime
Crime HORS 217
(2000 prices)
Violence against the
person (not including
Common Assault)
2005 Home Office
update (2003 prices)
2007-08 prices
£19,000 £10,407 £11,617
Common Assault £540 £1,440 £1,607
Sexual Offences £19,000 £31,438 £35,095
Robbery/Mugging £4,700 £7,282 £8,129
Burglary in a dwelling £2,300 £3,268 £3,648
Theft £600 £844 £942
Criminal Damage £510 £866 £967
Burglary not in a
£2,700 - £3,275
dwelling
Theft from a shop £100 - £121
Robbery/till snatch £5,000 - £6,065
Recorded crime data
Crime data is not routinely published for each force with a full breakdown.
Crimes like Common Assault, which are important to establishing the cost of
crime, are often included in “other” categories. For that reason we had to
send Freedom of Information Act requests to 42 forces in England, Wales
and Northern Ireland requesting the numbers of each individual crime in the
Home Office cost of crime categories. The Metropolitan Police statistics were
obtained from their website without the need for a Freedom of Information
request. We failed to obtain responses from Lancashire, Lincolnshire,
Hertfordshire and Merseyside police forces. Table A2 in the appendix shows
the number of crimes in each area broken down by type.
Differences in reporting standards between forces
Many forces advised that using recorded crime data to compare forces was
not appropriate. Cumbria Constabulary, for example, told us that:
“Police forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide
statistics to government bodies and the recording criteria is set
nationally. However, the systems used for recording these figures are
not generic. It should be noted that for this reason, this force's
response to your questions should not be used for comparison
purposes with any other response you may receive.”
While there will be differences in reporting standards between forces, and
efforts should be made to reduce those differences, that should not prevent
comparisons being made. In 2002 the National Crime Recording Standard
was introduced in order to make reporting more reliable and consistent. The
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