Report No. 30 Crime Statistics: User Perspectives Report No
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Crime Statistics: User Perspectives Statistics Commission Report No. 30 Crime Statistics: User Perspectives Report No. 30 Statistics Commission Report No. 30 Crime Statistics: User Perspectives September 2006 Report by the Statistics Commission Incorporating: Review of Crime Statistics by Matrix Research and Consultancy and Professor Tim Hope Statistics Commission Artillery House 11-19 Artillery Row London SW1P 1RT 020 7273 8008 www.statscom.org.uk © Crown Copyright 2006 Contents Page Part 1: Crime Statistics – User Perspectives 3 A report by the Statistics Commission Section 1: Recommendations 5 Section 2: Background to the report 7 Section 3: Rationale for recommendations 11 Part 2: Review of Crime Statistics 20 Report to the Commission by Matrix and Professor Tim Hope Executive Summary 25 Introduction 35 Approach 37 Context 39 Groups with an interest in crime statistics 49 Purposes for which crime statistics are used 55 Fitness for Purpose 63 Potential solutions 83 Findings and recommendations 95 Appendices 99 iii iv Preface By the Chairman of the Statistics Commission To produce a report on crime statistics is to travel a crowded road, one that may be in danger of intellectual grid-lock as ever more views from experts, commentators and the media run up against one another. Thus our decision to produce this report at this time may require some explanation, and perhaps justification. The Statistics Commission exists to help ensure official statistics are trustworthy and responsive to public needs. Crime statistics are the quintessential ‘official figures’, a measure both of society and of government, telling us something about the social hazards we face and something about the success of government and public services in containing those hazards. How much the figures tell us about either the hazards or their containment is hotly debated. There is no magic formula that will turn crime figures into the perfect tool for either purpose. Nonetheless they remain important and influential, permeating decision- making across central and local government, the police and all levels of society. They inform everything from broad social policy to decisions we make as individuals on where to live, whether to go out at night or let our children play outside. This report is the third in a series that the Statistics Commission has produced, each looking at a major area of social or economic policy. Our approach is to consider the perspectives of a spectrum of users of the statistics – users in the sense of organisations or people who need information of this kind to inform their decisions. It is only when statistics are used to inform decisions that we regard them as earning their keep. If they are good enough for the purposes that users want to put them to then they are probably good enough – there is no benchmark of absolute quality. If they are not good enough for those purposes then users need to be told and, where practical, improvements made. As a generalisation, if statistics are not trusted they are not useful. In our Interim Report in December 2005, we noted that broad statistical messages about crime – the ones most of us look for most of the time – are being lost against a backdrop of confused reporting; and this confusion is both a cause and a consequence of a lack of trust. The need to promote greater trust is thus central to this report. 1 Our conclusions and recommendations are based on work we commissioned from Matrix Research and Consultancy, whose report to us is reproduced in full in Part 2. This in turn drew on the views of many leading experts in the field to whom we are indebted. In Part 1, we have however placed our own emphasis on various points, taking account of the Commission’s views on the development of official statistics more generally. We make a small number of broad recommendations which we believe will help to increase trust, enhance communication and address some specific concerns about data availability and quality. These are the priorities for action and we will be pursuing them with the Home Office and others as appropriate. Our recommendations are developmental rather than radical, but taken together with the Government’s current proposals to legislate to put the governance of the whole statistical system on a statutory footing, they offer a practical way forward. In January 2006, the then Home Secretary set up a cross-party working group, under the chairmanship of Professor Adrian Smith, to review, and advise Ministers on, how crime statistics should be compiled and published. We have stayed in touch with this group whilst developing our own independent report. Once Professor Smith’s group reports we will respond publicly and constructively to their conclusions. More recently, in July 2006, the report From Improvement to Transformation, an action plan for reform of the Home Office, was published. This noted the importance of accurate information. It undertook to ‘streamline the statistics published’ and to focus on ‘producing timely and accurate information’. We see no tension between this commitment and our own recommendations as long as the streamlined statistics address the information needs of society, and not just those of the department. I would like to thank all those who contributed over many months to this report, particularly Commission member Martin Weale, who chaired the project board, and Matrix Research and Consultancy who undertook much of the work. Chairman, Statistics Commission September 2006 2 Crime Statistics: User Perspectives PART 1 Report by the Statistics Commission 3 4 Statistics Commission Report No. 30 Crime Statistics: User Perspectives Introduction 1. This report looks at official statistics on crime. It considers who uses the statistics, for what purposes, whether the available statistics meet those purposes, and whether further statistical sources or outputs might need to be developed. 2. This is the third in a series of reports by the Statistics Commission that examine statistics in a specific area of social or economic policy from the perspective of users – previous reports have covered statistics on health and on school education. 3. Part 1 is the Commission’s own report. It builds on our earlier Interim Report1, and draws extensively on a detailed Review of Crime Statistics conducted on our behalf by Matrix Research and Consultancy (the ‘Consultancy Review’) which forms Part 2. 4. The Consultancy Review makes a number of specific recommendations which we have taken into account in determining our views within the Commission. They can be found in their original form on page 95 and readers are encouraged to consider them alongside our own recommendations. 5. Within Part 1: • Section 1 lists the Commission’s recommendations. • Section 2 outlines the background – in particular the Consultancy Review and the Commission’s Interim Report. • Section 3 sets out the rationale for each of the recommendations. SECTION 1: RECOMMENDATIONS 6. The Commission’s recommendations follow four main themes: structural separation between Home Office policy functions and the compilation and publication of crime statistics; improved communication with users through clearer presentation of the statistics at the time of publication; better, more consistent, crime data for small areas, through more systematic exploitation of existing police data sources; and further technical research on options where the existing statistics do not fully meet demand – including the best measure of ‘total crime’, and ways to improve inter-administration (within the UK) comparisons of crime statistics. 1 Crime Statistics: Users Perspectives. Interim Report. Statistics Commission, December 2005 5 Recommendation 1: Responsibility for the compilation and publication of crime statistics should be located at arm’s length from Home Office policy functions and with clear accountability within the evolving framework of the government statistical service. Recommendation 2: Treasury and Home Office Ministers should consider together a fully developed business case for moving responsibility for the British Crime Survey to the Office for National Statistics and should publish their agreed view with supporting arguments. Recommendation 3: The Home Office, and others as appropriate, should make changes to the presentation of the recorded crime figures in order to communicate better the main messages. These steps include: • changing the definition of violent crime; • greater distinction between British Crime Survey results and police recorded crime data and the uses for which each source is appropriate; • ensuring regular reviews of statistical classifications. Recommendation 4: Existing local data should be better used to improve the quality and range of statistics on crime. This could be achieved through police forces agreeing to publish, in a co-ordinated way, standardised comparable analyses at a local level. These analyses need not necessarily be drawn together and published as official statistics by the Home Office but must be consistent with those that are. Recommendation 5: Comparability of crime statistics between the various countries within the UK should be improved, identifying and addressing areas of statistics where there are problems. Recommendation 6: Technical research should be carried out (to a published timetable) to develop a set of weighted index measures of ‘total crime’ and promote debate on which, if any, of these measures should be adopted alongside the current basic count. 6 Statistics Commission