Merseyside crime: Chart shows police charge rates where you live, including for burglaries and sex offences

New Home Office 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 data published on Thursday (27 April) shows in the nine months ending December 2022, only 7.2% of all the national 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 when 20.2% of crimes ended with a charge.

The percentage of crimes resulting in a charge in Merseyside: Merseyside saw figures slightly above the national picture, however, only 8% of all crimes in 2022/23 resulted in charges, a drop of 10.2% when compared to 2014/15 – the first year with comparable data - which saw 18.2% of all crimes resulting in a charge.

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.

Last year, Merseyside saw an increase in the number of rape suspects charged, increasing from 2.5% in 2021/22 to 7.2%. However, this is still drastically below 2014/14, which saw a charge rate of 18.7%.

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.

What the government has said: 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.