THE government has failed to reduce violent crime despite its pledges to tackle the problem, according to the last set of crime statistics likely to be released before the election.

Home Office figures, due to be published next month, are expected to show that offences such as assaults and wounding increased by 8% in England and Wales last year. In some areas police recorded a 30% rise in personal violence.

Police say the increase has been caused by binge drinking and a shortage of officers to patrol the streets because constables are tied up with duties such as form-filling, inflicted on them by the government.

Figures obtained last week from 25 of the 43 police forces in England and Wales show that the biggest rise in violence against the person — a category that includes assault, wounding and murder, but not robbery — was in Leicestershire. Murders and assaults in the county went up from 4,426 in the three months from October 2003 to 5,769 in the same period last year, a rise of 30%.

Overall, crime was down 6% nationally. House burglary dropped by 14% and robbery was down 3%. Sex crimes were up 12%, partly because the way sex offences are counted was changed last year.

Some forces said this weekend that the government was still directing too many police off the streets to take part in schemes to meet targets.

“As soon as the government says ‘We want to measure something’ I have got to get somebody to fill a form or sit at a computer screen so it can be measured,” said one senior officer in Lancashire, where there was a 20% rise in violent crime.

“If we measured less and there was not so much excessive bureaucracy we could have more people on the street fighting crime. There are loads of single-issue zealots in government who think their particular initiative is the most important issue.”

Additional reporting: Ozge Ibrahim and Batasha Varma

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