Did youth crime fall over the course of the last Parliament?

3 November, 2011 - 14:09 -- Amy Sippitt

Shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper claimed this week that youth crime had fallen over the course of the last Parliament.

“Indeed, youth crime fell over the course of the previous Parliament as fewer young people were drawn into criminal activity, but we want youth crime to fall further, not to go back up.” she said.

After Chris Grayling (at the time Shadow Home Secretary) was 'told off' by the UK Statistics Authority in February last year for using problematic crime statistics, Full Fact wanted to check whether Ms Cooper was making a fair comparison.

Mr Grayling had said recorded crime data showed a big increase in violent crime during Labour's stint in government, but it emerged that a change in the methodology for collecting the data in 2002 meant this was an unfair comparison to make.

The Home Office annual reports warned that since the National Crime Recording Standard was introduced in April 2002, “figures before and after that date are not directly comparable.”

So is Ms Cooper within her rights to make a comparison over the years 2005 to 2010?

The Shadow Home Secretary's department said her claim referred to figures from the Ministry of Justice and the Youth Justice Board.

The statistics on youth crime were broken down into the number of First Time Entrants, Proven Offences and the Under 18 Custody Population.

According to the report from the Youth Justice Board, the First Time Entrants figures were from recorded crimes on the Police National Computer while the latter two were based on figures from Youth Offending Teams.

Since it was a change in the way recorded crime was documented that was at the root of the Mr Grayling's problematic analysis, we contacted the Ministry of Justice just to make sure a comparison from 2005 to 2010 was a fair one to make, and they assured us it was.

The graph below shows that there was a slight rise in the number of First Time Entrants to the youth justice system from 2005 to 2006, before falling until 2010.

This graph shows a fall in the number of Proven Offences among those aged 10 to 17 over the same period.

Finally, this graph reflects a slight rise in the number of under-18s in Custody from 2005 to 2007/8 before falling substantially until 2010.

As a point of comparison, we thought it was worthwhile to set the fall in the context of trends in youth crime before 2005. The graphs below show that there was actually a slight rise in youth crime from 2002 to 2005/06, although the current rate has now fallen below the 2002 figures.

Update: The Ministry of Justice have been in contact with us again to add the caveat that some of the reduction in the number of First Time Entrants to the youth justice system can be accounted for by a decrease in the use of cautions and Penalty Notices for Disorder (PNDs) since 2007. The most recent quarterly report by the MOJ on crime pointed out that within the 2011 total for First Time Entrants to the justice system, "there were 45,519 juveniles, a figure that has fallen by 27 per cent since 12 months ending March 2010 and 59 per cent since the 12 months ending March 2007."