Was the Prime Minister right to claim crime is down 56%?

16 November 2023

At Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday, Rishi Sunak claimed crime has “decreased by 56% since 2010”. 

We looked at a similar claim from the Prime Minister earlier this year and found it was based on crime survey data for England and Wales that doesn’t include fraud or computer misuse, so this statistic doesn’t represent all crime. 

The way that crime survey data is collected changed a few years ago, so we don’t have comparable crime figures going back to 2010 that include fraud and computer misuse. 

Fraud and computer misuse accounted for 4.2 million of the 8.4 million total offences in the year to June. Crime, excluding these two specific offences, is down by 56% since 2010, according to the most recent crime survey for England and Wales. 

We wrote to the Prime Minister about this earlier this year. We asked him when using the comparative figure to be clear about what offences are excluded from the data, to ensure the public is not misled. 

We didn’t receive a response.

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