Coming of age in the Thatcher era left people paranoid about burglary, while those who reached adulthood under Tony Blair are more concerned about anti-social behaviour, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the universities of Sheffield and Southampton discovered that people’s perception of crime is biased by the political agenda from when they were aged between 15 and 25.

Young adulthood is known to be a time when people form key opinions and are most sensitive to social events.

To find out if there was a generational difference between perceived fear of crime, researchers analysed 30 years of data from the British Crime Survey involving 440,000 people which recorded attitudes to crime alongside age.

They found that those who grew up under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) or John Major (1990-1997) expressed the greatest level of worry about domestic burglary - the same generation who witnessed a dramatic rise in property crime during the 1980s.

Meanwhile, the Wilson/ Callaghan generation (1974 -1979) expressed the highest levels of worry about robbery and mugging, which was a key concern for politicians, policy makers and journalists at the time.