Serious violent crime is much worse than the Government has been claiming because police forces have been failing to record offences properly, it was disclosed yesterday.

The blunder means that the actual level of serious violence is up to 20 per cent higher than shown in the official figures. The disclosure coincides with the latest quarterly crime figures, which show a 20 per cent increase in grievous bodily harm with a knife.

The Home Office could not confirm how long the misrecording had been taking place but it could have lasted for at least a decade. Nor was it able to explain how Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary failed to spot the error. It provides ammunition to critics who say the figures are open to manipulation and cannot be believed.

At first the Home Office said that as many as 17 forces had been wrongly categorising grievous bodily harm with intent where there was no injury – crimes in which the perpetrator meant to cause serious injury but was prevented from doing so – but later the police said it affected all forces.

Expert View

Today's admission hardly reassures the public that other misrecording is not taking place

Richard Ford, Home Correspondent

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The Home Office asked 18 forces to reexamine their figures after the problem emerged but only 13 were able to provide accurate figures. Among those that admitted a failure to record offences correctly are Humberside, Derbyshire, Cambridgeshire and Thames Valley.

Officials insisted that the mistake did not affect the overall level of violent crime in England and Wales. It does mean that the proportion considered serious has been underestimated.

The misrecording arose because of how police forces categorise grievous bodily harm with intent. Instead of putting GBH with intent where there was no injury in the more serious violent crime category, police placed it in the less violent assaults category.

Keith Bristow, the Chief Constable of Warwickshire, said that “most, if not all” the 43 police forces in England and Wales, and the British Transport Police, were to some extent misinterpreting the guidance on recording grievous bodily harm with intent. When the mistake was corrected the annual increase in the most serious violent offences rose from 4,500 to 5,500 crimes out of a total of 237,000 violent crimes against the person.

The Association of Chief Police Officers said that police had not sought to make their record look better.

Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London, said that the Government should be open about which forces had made the errors. “Without this the scope for political interference and manipulation is significant.”

The row over misrecording overshadowed a generally good set of quarterly crime figures, showing falls in almost all areas of crime from April to June 2008 compared with the same quarter last year.

The figures showed that Offences fell by 6 per cent in both police records and the British Crime Survey (BCS), which interviews more than 40,000 over16s about their experience of offending. Violent crime remained stable on the BCS figures and incidents of violence as recorded by police fell by 7 per cent or 18,000 offences.

The figures showed that overall knife crime remained broadly stable at 8,610 incidents but that offences have become more serious. Gun crime continued to fall with firearm offences falling by 6 per cent to 9,306 offences.

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