Tories accused of misleading public over violent crime

Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, has been heavily criticised following allegations he manipulated official crime statistics in order to shame Labour’s efforts to tackle violent crime.

The accusations have led to an unprecedented rebuke from Sir Michael Scholar, chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, who warned that the way Mr Grayling used figures for violent crime were “likely to mislead the public”.

The row erupted after Mr Grayling made direct comparisons between violent crime statistics from the late 90’s with those for 2008 – 09. It later emerged that the government’s definition of violent crime was changed in 2002, making the statistics unreliable as a measure of how patterns of crime have changed.

Mr Grayling’s office arranged for a press release to go out in every constituency in England and Wales, purporting to show that violent crime had risen sharply under Labour, as part of a campaign spearheaded by Mr Cameron about “broken Britain”.

However, Mr Grayling had failed to take into account the more rigorous system for recording crime figures introduced by the Home Office in 2002. Instead of leaving it to the discretion of desk sergeants whether an incident should be recorded as a violent crime, police have been told they must always make a record of every complaint. As a result, official figures for violent crime leapt by more than a third in one year.

“I do not wish to become involved in political controversy but I must take issue with what you said about violent crime statistics, which seems to me likely to damage public trust in official statistics,” Sir Michael wrote in a letter to Mr Grayling yesterday.

He enclosed a note setting the view of the UK Statistics Authority, which said: “It would not be appropriate for the Authority to seek to intervene in political debate directly. However, where we see that official statistics have been presented or quoted in a way that seems likely to mislead the public, we will publicly draw this to the attention of those involved.”

Mr Grayling replied by promising to “take account of the request by the Statistics Authority, particularly with regard to the changes to recording practices made in 2002-03″.

But he insisted that he would “continue to use recorded crime statistics, because they reflect an important reality; that the number of violent crimes reported to police stations, and particularly serious violent crimes, has increased substantially over the past decade, even taking into account any changes to data collection”.

Jacqui Smith, the former home secretary, said the Tories had been caught “bang to rights” after sending out statistics to activists from the British Crime Survey without mentioning a Home Office warning that the methodology had changed.

Smith herself became involved in a similar row last year when she was forced to issue an apology after being accused by an academic of using “premature, irregular and selective” knife crime figures.

Alan Johnson, the home secretary, said the British Crime Survey indicated that violent crime had fallen by 41 per cent since 1997. “It’s one thing to make a slip-up on your figures – it’s quite another to deliberately mislead.”