Hundreds of thousands of people had their homes broken into last year, official statistics have revealed.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) found that around 779,000 incidents of domestic burglary occurred in the two countries from July 2013 to June 2014. Of these, approximately 569,000 involved the domestic burglary of a dwelling, while 221,000 involved the burglary of non-connected buildings, such as sheds and garages.
Furthermore, there were 780,000 incidents described as “other household theft” over the year, the survey found.
Although these might seem like massive numbers, breaches of domestic security have become much less commonplace in recent years, and the estimates for the year ending June 2014 are actually the lowest ever recorded by the CSEW. Since peaking in the middle of the 1990s, domestic burglary rates fell sharply until 2004 to 2005 and remained fairly flat until 2010 to 2011, when they began to fall again.
Therefore, the number domestic burglaries in the twelve months leading to June 2014 are 12% lower than in the previous year and 40% lower than in 2003 to 2004, the survey found. Similarly, rates of “other household theft” dropped by 17% over the year, with these crimes around half as commonplace as they were in 2003 to 2004.
Furthermore, only 2.7% of households were the victims of a burglary over the period analysed by the CSEW, compared with around 8.7% in the 1995 survey.
Not all domestic burglaries are recorded by the police, however; the CSEW noted that a total of 434,851 burglaries were recorded by police forces from July 2013 to June 2014. Of these, a total of 207,930 were recorded as domestic burglaries, with the remaining 226,921 occurred in non-domestic premises.
Overall, the number of ‘total theft offences’, which includes vehicle offences, burglary, shoplifting, theft from the person and a number of other crimes, dropped by 4% compared with the previous year, with shoplifting the only category to see an increase, from 307,660 incidents to 321,839 incidents
While England and Wales may appear to be getting significantly safer, an estimated 7.1 million cases of crimes against resident adults and households were recorded by the CSEW. This is despite the fact that all incidents of major crime types became less commonplace, with violence seeing a 23% annual fall and criminal damage offences dropping by 20%.
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The figures above show that while the number of crimes occurring in the UK are dropping, people are still at a real risk of being victimised by criminals, and that around one in 37 people experienced a domestic burglary last year.
Our home emergency cover plans are a great way for people to keep their homes safe and secure. When a security incident occurs in your main house – from a broken window, to a broken lock, to a key that has snapped off in the lock – you will simply have to give us a call, any time of the day and any day of the year, and we will send someone round to your home to make it safe as quickly as possible.
