By Adam Morris
During a trawl of police board papers, a sentence jumped out which I thought would finally bring clarity to a long-standing question: which has the higher crime rate, Scotland or England?
It’s long been a disputed area.
Successive Scottish Government justice secretaries have boasted that people are safer north of the border than our English counterparts, and regularly deploy that line when defending falling police numbers.
But officers themselves say this is nonsense, and that on the ground things are no better in Scottish towns and cities than anywhere else. Many say they are getting worse.
So my eyes lit up when I read the following statement in the quarterly Scottish policing performance report.
“Between April 2024 and June 2024, recorded crime in England and Wales decreased by 2.3 per cent, while Police Scotland recorded an increase of 4.4 per cent for the same period.”
This line appeared to seal what was a long unprovable comparison, and immediately warranted further investigation to, in journalistic terms, “stand it up”.
But there’s a reason you have never read a news story explicitly revealing the corresponding crime rates between Scotland and the rest of the UK.
It’s because journalists, politicians, and statisticians have simply been unable to do it: there are just too many obstacles.
Even Dr Ben Matthews, a lecturer in social statistics and demography at the University of Stirling, told 1919 that comparisons are “hard to do” because of the numerous differences in recording systems and various legislative systems.
“At every level of recording, people are making so many decisions about what to include, what to exclude,” he explains.
“Even between forces in England and Wales there will be different ways of doing things.
“It’s rare to find an area where you are really comparing apples to apples.”
The difficulty extends internationally too.
Some forces across Europe use the “principle offence rule”, Dr Matthews explains.
This is where someone might go out and commit a number of crimes in one flashpoint, such as breach of the peace, criminal damage and assault.
“It’s rare to find an area where you are really comparing apples to apples”
Dr Ben Matthews, University of Stirling
In Scotland, it is likely that would be included as three separate crimes, and reflected in statistics accordingly.
But in some English forces, as well as many European ones, only the most serious offence would be recorded.
Another complication is the issue of fraud, a crime that is increasing massively across the world.
If you’re a fraud victim in England, you don’t report it to the police, but instead file your complaint to a dedicated anti-fraud agency.
Therefore, the police don’t physically record it, because they were never told.
But in Scotland, fraud victims’ only avenue is through Police Scotland, meaning they do record it.
So any fair comparison has to remove fraud from its calculations, obliterating more than one million crimes each year from consideration.
Timescales pose another issue.
The police papers stated crime had dropped in a three-month period in England and Wales by 2.3 per cent.
But at the same time, widespread media reports showed crime had in fact risen there by 10 per cent for the whole year.
The types of crime recorded also throw up a barrier.
For instance, it’s simple to tell in Scotland how many rapes have occurred each year because it is explicitly stated in data.
But in English crime figures, the Office for National Statistics gathers the data as “sexual assault”, which brings additional offences into the mix.
With weapons, English police forces record the simple act of possessing a weapon.
However, in Scotland it is recorded as whether those weapons were used.
There is also confusion around housebreaking, which in Scotland is clearly communicated as the act of breaking into someone’s home.
In England, the crime is called burglary and can include entering outbuildings and business premises.
Some crimes do allow for a comparison. Shoplifting in 2024 was slightly higher in England at eight cases per 1,000 people, as opposed to 7.9 in Scotland.
But Scots were also significantly more likely to be convicted of drugs offences (4.5 per 1,000 compared to three per 1,000 in England).
These difficulties are then compounded by other factors, such as the sheer difference in geography, with Scotland hosting one-tenth of the population across one-third of the land mass.
Those defending UK crime rates have also proffered the fact England has a truly global city in London, which brings increased rates in certain crimes, as well as being considerably more exposed to border and terror-related threats.
In his recent speech at the Scottish Police Federation conference in Ayrshire, chair David Threadgold begged the Scottish Government to stop using cross-border comparisons to put a positive spin on policing.
He told justice secretary Angela Constance that she should not engage in a “race to the bottom”, and that comparing the two did no favours for officers on the ground facing up to the daily challenge of policing Scotland’s streets.
But it seems nobody really has the right to boast about divergent offence statistics, because such a calculation is virtually impossible to achieve.