The decline of heavy industry in Britain during the Thatcher era led to a significant increase in crime, according to the first study of its kind.

Four decades after Margaret Thatcher swept to power, research has found that in areas where the coal, steel, ship and railway industries were hit during the 1980s, young people were much more likely to find themselves in trouble with the police. University of Derby researchers analysed data from the census and the birth cohort study of 16,000 people born in the same week in April 1970 and cross-referenced this with cautions they received from the police and their area’s employment level.

Between 1980 and 2000, the number of young people receiving cautions was 21% higher in those areas with the highest level of job losses than in those with the lowest rise.

Professor Stephen Farrall, who carried out the research with Dr Emily Gray and Dr Phil Jones, told the British Sociological Association’s annual conference that the study was the first to quantifiably link the long-term effects of the collapse of heavy industry and young people’s criminal records. “No one has ever attempted to study the link between individual offending careers and political decision-making. Current approaches adopted by criminologists tend to focus on the offender’s personal characteristics, and have failed to engage with the way that political decision-making shapes the lives and life courses of citizens,” he said.

The researchers found that by using data on housing, neighbourhood, relationships, health and psychological wellbeing, they could establish a link with the number of cautions handed down by police to those between the ages of 10 and 30.

However, they found that analysis of the data that did not include economic factors explained only about a quarter of the offending. Adding data on the rise in unemployment in their area confirmed that it was responsible for half of the cautions.

“Our analysis is much more accurate in predicting the criminal activities of some of the young people, by including the rise in unemployment in their area,” Farrall said.

The academics claim that their research shows how government policies during the 1980s played a part in kick-starting offending careers.

“If you had a dad who was down the pit or in a steel mill, you were expected to follow him into that occupation, and if his pit or mill closed, that pulled the economic rug from under you,” Farrall said. “So the process of deindustrialisation took away young people’s hope and aspirations when they were young by making their parents unemployed and hitting their own job prospects. That could lead to them turning to drugs and crime.”

Farrall said that the policies, which saw overall unemployment in Britain double from just over 4% in 1979, to over 8% by 1981, hit the industrial heartlands of Britain hardest.

In areas where unemployment stayed low – at 4% or under – 14% of people surveyed had police cautions. In areas where it rose to 8%, 17% had cautions, a rise of three percentage point, or 21.4%.

“The radicalism of the early phase of Thatcherite economic policies created quite profound and immediate economic problems which fell disproportionately on those communities which had relied on heavy industry – mining, steel work and the associated industries such as railway yards and locomotive depots,” Farrall said.

“The substantive message that our research delivers is that the background structural causes of offending at the individual level may rest as much with a country’s politicians as they do with ‘street-level’ actors.”