Only 5.5% of crimes end with the suspect in court
THE proportion of crime suspects taken to court remains at one of its lowest-ever levels. According to Home Office figures, just 5.5% of crimes in England and Wales resulted in a charge or summons in the year to September 2022.
This meant suspects faced prosecution on 302,534 occasions in that period.
It comes as the number of sexual offences recorded by police in England and Wales hit a record high.
The figure for prosecutions has generally declined over the years and is now less than half the percentage in September 2015 (14%). It was 6% for the same period in 2021, according to figures which exclude data from Greater Manchester Police because of problems the force had recording crime at that time.
The most common reason for a case being closed continued to be because no suspect was identified, the data showed. This happened in more than 2 million cases (36.4%).
In more than a quarter of cases (25.5%, or more than 1.4 million), the victim did not support further action. The lowest charging rate continues to be for rape, with 1.6% of 70,633 offences recorded by police in that period leading to prosecution.
More than 40% of these were closed because the victim did not support further police action, the figures suggest.
The Home Office previously said it was the responsibility of chief constables and police and crime commissioners to make sure criminal cases were investigated properly.
The likelihood of a crime resulting in a charge could vary for a number of reasons, including the complexity or severity of an offence or the difficulty in identifying a suspect.
Changes in charge rates are likely to be the result of more crimes being recorded by police and forces taking on more complex cases which could take longer to resolve, the department added.
New figures also reveal that the number of police-recorded sexual offences in England and Wales has hit a new record high. There were 199,021 sex crimes logged by forces in the year to September 2022. This is up 22% compared with the year ending March 2020 (163,244), prior to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Of these, 35% (70,633) were rapes - a 20% increase from the 59,104 recorded in the 12 months to March 2020.
The figures, published on Thursday, also show the overall number of crimes recorded by England and Wales police forces exceeded prepandemic levels to reach 6.6 million in the 12 months to September. This was 10% higher than the year to March 2020 when 6.1 million offences were recorded.
The number of offences police flagged as domestic abuse-related rose by 14% from 798,607 in the year to March 2020 to 910,980 in the same period last year.
There were rises in the numbers of homicides and robberies, as well as crimes involving knives and firearms recorded by police in the last year since restrictions on movement ended. But all remain below levels seen before the pandemic. The ONS urged “caution” when interpreting the data, stressing that the rise in reports of sexual offences could be affected by a “number of factors” including improvements in how police record crime as well as victims being more willing to come forward.