The Metropolitan police solved six out of every 100 burglaries last year, nearly half the rate their officers cleared up five years ago.

Britain’s biggest police force said it solved 12% of burglaries in 2010-11. Labour said the sharp fall in the clear-up rate since then was due to budget cuts imposed by the Conservatives, but the Met said the way it counted the figures had changed.



Joanne McCartney, policing spokeswoman for Labour in London, who put together the figures, said: “With the rate of reported burglaries falling, freeing up police resources and time, we should be seeing a rise in the number of solved cases. In reality, this hasn’t been the case and this can only be because of government cuts to the police force.

“With 94% of all domestic burglaries in the capital going unsolved it’s clear London’s police service is already being stretched to the limit.”

The Met accepts Labour’s figures for burglaries are correct but says the reason is because of a radical change in what now counts as a solved burglary.

The force says over half of the burglaries they used to record as solved came from people who admitted a string of other offences after they were arrested. The force says this practice, called taking into consideration (TIC) other offences, was open to abuse.

Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Met’s commissioner, became embroiled in a public spat a fortnight ago with other police chiefs after saying his force would continue to send an officer to every burglary.

Sara Thornton, the chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, had said cuts would mean an officer may not attend every scene or might take longer to get there. She said big funding cuts could mean victims of burglary could be asked to send video and pictures of the aftermath to police.

The Met says that over half of its clear-ups in 2010-11 were gained from offenders who were arrested and then admitted to other offences. The force said there were problems with the integrity of that practice and they have largely stopped counting TICs as burglaries they have solved.

Commander Simon Letchford, who leads on burglary for the Met, told the Guardian the change has caused their clear-up rate to fall, but their figure is now more “ethical”. In 2010-11, 53% of burglaries were due to arrested people confessing to other offences, or TICs. Now that figure is just 8%.

Letchford said: “A person would be arrested for burglary and have other offences taken into consideration and could potentially admit hundreds of offences – and all this was shown as detected crime. We used to do a lot of TICs, as did quite a lot of other forces. There have been occasions where people have manipulated the system. It can be manipulated by officers and offenders.”

The Met says the overall number of burglaries has fallen in the last five years, from 65,840 in 2010-11 to 50,662 in 2014-15, in line with the falling national trend in reported crime.

McCartney said: “It’s clear the historic inclusion of TICs meant solved burglary figures were padded out, making them look much better than they were”.

Forces in the UK have different methodologies for counting clear-up rates for crime. Letchford declined to say whether the use of TICs by other forces was wrong: “It is a Home Office-approved way of clearing up crime. If they [other forces] want to continue doing that, it’s a lawful way of solving crime.”

Letchford said the Met’s clear-up rate of burglaries has gone up slightly over the last five years, from 5.4% to 6%. It is behind other forces he conceded, and Letchford said that 6% was “not good enough”.

In 2013-14 – the last year for which comparative data is available – the Met was the worst-performing force for solving burglaries from people’s homes.

Before it changed the way the way it counted, the Met caught offenders in 11% of burglaries, against a national average of 15.5%, according to figures from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary. That disparity is even worse now the Met has stopped relying so heavily on offenders admitting other offences.

Comparable forces serving big urban areas did better. Greater Manchester police solved 14% of burglaries from homes, West Midlands 13%, and West Yorkshire 18%. The City of London force claimed a 25% clear-up rate for burglaries, and South Wales claimed a 37% rate.