Statement from the Minister for Policing and Criminal Justice
Nick Herbert said, ‘These new figures reinforce our longstanding belief that to date, crime measures have offered either a partial or confused picture about the level of offending.
‘However you look at these statistics, they reveal what people know only too well - that crime affecting young people is a serious problem which must be tackled.
‘We need a common sense approach that recognises young people’s experiences so that we don’t criminalise children by failing to properly distinguish between playground spats and serious crime.
‘The public must have full and trusted information if we are to restore confidence in the statistics and drive effective action to tackle crime. We are currently considering how crime statistics should be collected and published in future, and will work with the UK Statistics Authority to consider this carefully.’