Police have slammed a former mayor who said rape is "easy to report" and suggested police should stop recording reports of rape as an offence.

Tory councillor Alan Amos made the shocking comments after official figures revealed a 168% rise in reports of rape nationally since 2011.

Over the last five years, just over a thousand rape offences were reported to police, including a record high in 2015 of 324.

Controversial councillor Amos, who represents Gorse Hill and Warndon in Worcestershire, stunned superintendent Kevin Purcell of West Mercia Police, who accused him of being old-fashioned.

Speaking at a council meeting in Worcester, Amos said: "Correct me if I'm wrong because the law may have changed, but the accused can be named in public and the accuser is not named.

"So in that sense it's a claim, or an allegation - easy to make, difficult to prove. The reason I'm asking this is because I'm concerned people are talking about massive increases in this, massive increases in that," he said.

"But surely you can only do that on the basis of convictions? Unless there's been a conviction you can't say that offence has occurred."

But superintendent Purcell challenged him saying: "I'm sure it wasn't meant to sound like that, but if you ring us up and say 'we've got a burglary' we don't say 'wait until we've got a suspect arrested and charged, we don't believe you' - we'd say you've had a burglary and we'd deal with it.

"We do our best to deal with it properly, that should and definitely does include rape. The concept of 'we don't believe them until someone is charged' is probably set 30 years ago."

Councillor Amos then conceded that police must judge the situation for themselves, before adding: "It seems this is an allegation which is 'easy' to make.

"That's difficult to solve, I know, but if someone just comes along and makes it and it goes down as a reported offence, then we're going to get these horrendous figures.

"I just wonder whether that's helpful to us, to have those kind of figures."

Supt Purcell said they were not "horrendous figures, but people brave enough to come forward.

"National police guidelines state that if someone says it's happened, then it's happened."

Labour Councillor Chris Bloore said: "Reporting a rape is not an 'easy' thing to do."