Constituency-level crime data

It is not possible to obtain constituency-level crime data from the two sources of official crime statistics – the police recorded crime series and the Crime Survey of England and Wales (CSEW; formerly called the British Crime Survey).

A new source of crime data is the Police.uk website which provides street level crime and anti-social behaviour data for each month from December 2010. this dataset maps each crime to the nearest map point (centre point of a street, above a public place such as a park or airport, or above a commercial premise like a shopping centre or nightclub). Each of these map points must contain eight or more postal addresses or no postal addresses at all.

As offence data is linked to each map point and the postcodes of each map point are available it is possible to aggregate data to different geographic levels, such as parliamentary constituency.

The House of Commons Library is considering how best to use this source of crime data. We would be very interested to hear from MPs and their staff as to whether such constituency-level data using non-national statistics is desired given that local authority level data, using the National Statistics series, is available back to 2002/03.