Crime costs Britain £33 billion a year in treatment for victims, damaged or lost property, and preventative measures, according to analysis by the Tories.
The party has utilized official crime data to update a Home Office model that attempts to estimate its economic and social cost.
Violent crimes where a victim is injured account for the largest annual bill, at £10 billion, followed by £6.7 billion for violence where no one is injured.
The Tories claim this represents an increase of £300 million in the last year alone for violence, and the party asserts that the cost of all crime has risen by £445 million in the past year, bringing it to a total of £33 billion.
This equates to £478 for every adult and child in the UK, assuming a population of nearly 70 million. This represents an increase of 1.3 percent from the cost in the previous year.
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The Tories are using this analysis to promote their crime policies, with a promise to hire an additional 10,000 police officers, supported by £650 million in funding, over three years.
They would also initiate a campaign of intense hotspot police patrolling in 2,000 areas with the highest rates of violent crime and robbery in an effort to prevent approximately 35,000 offences.
They plan to rewrite police rules to make it easier for officers to stop and search suspected criminals by lowering the threshold for using the tactic and expanding the use of powers to stop without suspicion. They estimate this would triple the number of stops and searches from 535,000 in 2024 to over 1.5 million.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “It’s never comfortable to put a price on crime, but these figures expose the scale of Labour’s failure. They measure not just money lost but lives damaged by a Labour Government that has let law and order fall apart.
“Keir Starmer does not have the backbone to stand up and make the difficult decisions Britain needs. Now he’s paralysed, too frightened to face down the soft-Left activists who think criminals are victims and victims are statistics.
“The real crime is what Labour has done to our country. A country left less safe, less secure, and less certain that justice still means something. The Conservatives will restore that certainty – putting control back in the hands of the law, not the lawless.”
An estimate of the financial cost of crime was first conducted by the Home Office in 2018 based on three factors: “anticipation” of crime such as the cost of burglar alarms, “consequences” such as property stolen or damaged, and response including costs to the police and the criminal justice system.
Homicide accounted individually for the highest “unit cost” of £3.2 million per killing, but with the number of homicides proportionately lower than other crimes, the net changes in rates have little effect on the overall cost. Figures last week showed homicides at a record low of 518 offences in England and Wales.
Rape accounted for the second-highest cost at £39,360 per individual, followed by violence with injury at £14,050, robbery at £11,320, and vehicle theft at £10,290.
Crime trends over the past seven years have been mixed, with fraud pushing overall crime rates up while offences such as burglary, violence with injury, and gun crime have decreased. Shoplifting and sexual offences have risen to record highs in the past year.
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Using Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, the Tories calculated that the cost of fraud had reached £2.3 billion and the cost of rape and other sexual offences had risen to nearly £5.2 billion—an increase of over £500 million in the last year alone. The cost of robbery stood at more than £1.2 billion.
The Tories claimed that, based on their analysis, the cost of crime fell by £16 billion from nearly £49 billion in 2018 to its current rate of £33 billion.
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