FOI Reference: FOI/2022/4000
You asked
I would be grateful if you could provide the following information:
Number of crimes reported between 2018 and 2022 in England and Wales by year, town/city and local authority and crime type. Please split violence and sexual offences by sex of perpetrator(s), e.g. female perpetrator violence and sexual offences and male perpetrator violence and sexual offences.
Please provide a ranking of safest towns and cities in England and Wales, which includes all towns and cities in England and Wales, with a breakdown of number of crimes reported/committed by crime type for each town/city and population numbers for each town/city (so a crime rate per 1000 can be calculated).
Please use the following list of crime types or a similar categorisation:
- Anti-Social Behaviour
- Bicycle Theft
- Burglary
- Criminal Damage and Arson
- Drugs
- Possession of Weapons
- Public Order
- Robbery
- Shoplifting
- Theft From the Person
- Vehicle Crime
- Violence and Sexual Offences
For the purposes of this request, please use a definition of town as a settlement with a population of 7500 or more. Please aggregate village's data with the parent town's data.
We said
Thank you for your request.
The smallest geographical level at which we publish data is at the Community Safety Partnership (CSP) level. As such we do not hold analysis on individual towns or cities.
CSPs equate, in the majority of instances, to local authorities. Some CSPs do equate to cities, for example "Bristol, city of" but this is not always the case.
You will find the crime categories you have requested at the CSP level in our CSP tables. They are updated quarterly, and the most recent tables are for year ending September 2021. Previous versions of the tables can be found via the link above. Table C5 provides recorded crime rates per 1,000 population, which are best to use for comparisons as they consider different population sizes. The next release date is scheduled for 28 April 2022.
We do not publish any perpetrator information in our CSP tables and, as police recorded crime (PRC) data is collected and held by the Home Office, we are unable to provide this breakdown. However, if you contact the Home Office directly, they may be able to provide additional assistance, they can be contacted at the following email address: CrimeandPoliceStats@homeoffice.gov.uk.
You can also access the PRC data in an open data format at both CSP and PFA level via the Home Office open data tables. These provide recorded numbers for each offence before they are aggregated into overall categories broken down by quarter for each geography.
CSP tables do not include data on anti-social behaviour. The smallest geographical level at which we publish anti-social behaviour estimates is Police Force Area (PFA). However, PFAs are a higher geographical level than CSPs, and again do not indicate specific towns or cities. These estimates are published once a year, in the year ending March PFA tables. The most recent are year ending March 2021 (tables P11 and P12), estimates for the year ending March 2022 will be published in July.
You might also be interested in the Police.uk site as these include anti-social behaviour figures down to postcode level.
If you have any other crime-related data queries, please feel free to email crimestatistics@ons.gov.uk.