Inaccurate crime rate statistics have gaslighted the British public
The UK’s shoddy national stats mean the government knows very little about the people it governs. From crime rates to the labour market, this has real consequences, writes James Snell
If you want to be brave in the capital these days, you use your phone while walking about on the street, or while waiting for a bus. You may not be robbed every time you do this. Indeed, you’d be unlucky if you were. But eventually, if you do it long enough, you’ll be robbed. Possibly, if your grip is strong, you’ll be dragged along the pavement a little by the people stealing from you, adding injury to insult.
For several years, official statistics completely failed to record the increase in thefts like this in London. Smug recyclers of the state’s numbers told people who saw things with their own eyes that they were wrong. It was misinformation to suggest that crime was surging, and if you said it was, you should be censored by the government, possibly imprisoned.
Official crime rate surveys have now started to show what everyone else has seen for most of this decade: that, while the most violent of crimes may have decreased, shoplifting, pickpocketing and snatch theft has exploded. Indeed, according to the ONS, theft from the person offences are now at their highest level since current police records began in 2003.
Crime rate statistics are still wrong – how could they be right when computer misuse and fraud are barely measured and less than one per cent of many crimes result in a charge, let alone a conviction? But they are now, very grudgingly, beginning to move towards visible reality.
The extent of the UK’s data problem
Many other government numbers are also inaccurate, or worse, nonexistent. People in the civil service will admit their departments’ ignorance of things they ought to be measuring, and the press and politicians will generally steer clear of asking why. Office of Budget Responsibility forecasts and projections are notoriously inaccurate. Yet rather than learning this after many years of failed predictions, the OBR has in fact become even more important. It is now essentially a star chamber superintending all fiscal policy.
The Labour Force Survey conducted by the Office for National Statistics has been formally considered unreliable since late 2024. People who ask about it are told it will not be fixed – if it is possible to fix – until 2027 at the latest.
It’s hard to make decisions about the labour market – to hire and to fire, to train people, to invest – if the official numbers are known to be incorrect and unlikely to be reliable for at least two more years.
Activists and politicians who put in Freedom of Information requests and ask parliamentary questions looking for specific numbers – for instance, the breakdown of taxes paid by British residents from foreign countries – are told that those numbers are not collected. Britain used to have data about the proportion of people who left the country after their visas expired, but the state doesn’t collect those numbers now either.
This is a scandal.
Increasingly, the country is governed not by flawed people doing their best on limited information, but by people engaged in an active conspiracy to conceal the basic incapacity of the state. Put plainly, the government knows very little – and knows it knows very little – about the country it rules and its people.
How can anyone invest in Britain if official statistics are absent or incorrect or actively misleading? Britain’s politicians claim to care a great deal about the country’s international reputation. Mostly, it seems, politicians think this is about following foreign court judgements to the letter and censoring the internet.
Yet there is a strange silence about the total failures of the British government to produce accurate numbers about the state of the country. Why would anyone want to invest, to spend, to build or to live in Britain if the truth is so resolutely hidden?
James Snell is a writer, former think tank special advisor and the author of The Fall of the Assads