Crime over time in England and Wales
Recorded crime across the 35 forces that published every month fell 1.8% between the year to June 2017 and the year to June 2026, from 5,232,037 to 5,138,490.
These are like-for-like figures, not the England and Wales total. They add up the 35 police forces that published every month from July 2016 to June 2026, which between them account for 90% of everything published for England and Wales over the last year shown.
A force that missed even one month is left out of every month, not just the ones it missed. The published total does the opposite: it carries on adding up whoever filed, so when a force stops, its absence is drawn as a fall in crime.
The line ends in June 2026 rather than July 2026 because North Yorkshire Police has not yet published July 2026, and leaving it out for one late month would cost every month before it.
The 8 forces left out, and why
- City of London Police: missed June 2022
- Devon & Cornwall Police: missed November 2022 to June 2023
- Dyfed-Powys Police: missed May and June 2023, February to April 2024
- Gloucestershire Constabulary: nothing since January 2026
- Greater Manchester Police: nothing since June 2019
- Lincolnshire Police: missed April to June 2023
- Staffordshire Police: missed June 2020
- Sussex Police: missed June 2020
Month by month
Year by year
Calendar years inside the period. A change is given only between two complete years, because a year missing months is not comparable with one that has them all.
| Year | Recorded | Change on the year before | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2,604,318 | July to December only | |
| 2017 | 5,386,347 | ||
| 2018 | 5,460,565 | +1.4% | |
| 2019 | 5,525,038 | +1.2% | |
| 2020 | 5,598,155 | +1.3% | |
| 2021 | 5,471,091 | −2.3% | |
| 2022 | 5,484,007 | +0.2% | |
| 2023 | 5,379,241 | −1.9% | |
| 2024 | 5,238,220 | −2.6% | |
| 2025 | 5,169,504 | −1.3% | |
| 2026 | 2,527,384 | January to June only |
What a change in recorded crime does and does not mean
Everything here is crime the police recorded, which is not the same thing as crime that happened. Three things move recorded crime that have nothing to do with how much of it there is.
- How carefully the police record. A 2014 inspection found forces failing to record around one crime in five reported to them. Recording was tightened in response, and recorded violence and public order offences climbed for years afterwards without the Crime Survey for England and Wales finding a rise to match.
- How much the police go looking. Drug offences and possession of weapons are mostly found by officers searching people, so they follow the amount of searching as closely as the amount of offending.
- How many people there are. These are counts, not rates. The population of England and Wales grew by about 6% between the 2011 and 2021 censuses, so a count that holds steady over that time is a rate that is slowly falling.
For long-run trends in the offences it covers, the Office for National Statistics treats the Crime Survey for England and Wales as the better guide. Recorded crime comes into its own for what the survey cannot do: rare offences, single months and individual places. How the figures on this site work.
All recorded crime is the same figure every other page on this site uses: every street-level record the police publish, which includes anti-social behaviour.