How many crimes are solved where you live? Chart shows police charge rates including for burglaries and sex offences

Crime has become a focal battleground for next week’s local elections in England, with the Labour Party pulling no punches in a series of attack ads taking aim at the Conservative Party’s record on criminal justice.

From burglaries to rape, violent crime to car theft, there has been increasing anxiety from communities across England and Wales in recent years about the chances we have of seeing justice done if we fall victim to crime – or of even getting a visit from police when we call 999 to report one. 

Voters in many parts of England will head to the polls on 4 May – and Labour has put crime front and centre in its campaign, with Shadow Justice Secretary Steve Reed claiming recently his is “the party of law and order” as he accused the Conservatives of leaving “dangerous criminals free to roam the streets”. 

And while the Tories have this week been celebrating hitting their target to recruit 20,000 new police officers (although as NationalWorld has shown, the government has only filled a gap that it itself created, bringing police numbers back up to where they were before swingeing cuts after the Conservatives came to power in 2010) the statistics show that charge rates – that’s the proportion of crimes in which police charge a suspect – have plummeted across a range of offences during the last decade. 

Analysis of the latest Home Office data published on Thursday (27 April) shows in the nine months ending December 2022, only 7.2% of all the crimes wrapped up and assigned an outcome by police saw a suspect charged. That translates to an average one in 14 chance of victims seeing action towards a suspect being prosecuted – and many of those charged may not even make it to court. The charge rate was almost three times higher in the year ending March 2015 – the first year with comparable data – when 20.2% of crimes ended with a charge. 

While the national picture looks bad, victims in some areas face even worse outcomes than others, with the charge rate at a staggeringly low 3.8% in the West Midlands Police area. The highest rate was in Devon and Cornwall, but even there charge rates were far lower than the national average nine years ago, with only 12.3% of crimes solved. 

So what has been happening to crime where you live? We have crunched the numbers to reveal how charge rates fare where you live, with the interactive chart below revealing how far they have fallen over the last nine years. 

As well as overall crime, we have also analysed the data for a select group of high-volume or high-harm crimes: rape and other sexual offences, violence against the person, robbery, domestic burglaries, theft of a motor vehicle, and theft from the person. 

The interactive chart will allow you to look up types of crime and the name of a police force, to create a timeseries of charge rates. If you can't see the chart, you can open it in a new window here. The figures are based on crimes assigned an outcome by police in a given year, rather than crimes that were necessarily committed that year. A crime committed in 2020/21 but given an outcome the next year would be included in 2021/22’s figures. 

This means only cases that have been closed and had an outcome assigned to them are included, and any open cases that police are still investigating or weighing up whether to bring charges in are excluded.

While the Home Office data gives the total number of crimes and the number that resulted in a suspect being charged, NationalWorld has this week uncovered how some of these suspects may have been charged with different crimes than the one that was reported and recorded, with a freedom of information request revealing that between April 2017 and September 2022, more than 1,600 rapists reportedly 'charged' by police (one in 10) had in fact been charged with alternative offences.

This data is not published, so it is not possible to determine how many of the suspects charged for other crimes were charged for the offence recorded.

What has the government said on crime?

Earlier this month Chris Philip, Minister for Crime and Policing, vowed to cut down "on red tape which so often gets in the way of real police work". The changes, which will remove requirements for police to record certain types of crime or to record less information, would save 443,000 hours of police time each year, he said, which will now be "spent catching criminals and supporting victims".

Philip also outlined measures to save time that police currently spend responding to mental health crises where there is not threat to life or safety, through closer partnerships between the police, hospitals, ambulances and councils.