Fact check: Crime statistics and waiting lists in Scotland

This summary of claims from the campaign trail has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s largest fact checking charity working to find, expose and counter the harms of bad information, as part of the PA news agency’s Election Check 24.

Is crime rising or falling?

Crime has been a key issue in the general election campaign, with some apparently contradictory claims made by different parties. The Conservatives, for example, have repeatedly argued crime has fallen significantly, while Reform UK has said it is at “record” levels.

This is at least in part because there are different ways of measuring crime — in particular, police recorded crime statistics and crime survey data.

All offences that are reported to the 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales and the British Transport Police are collated and published as police recorded crime statistics. But one problem with relying on this data is that not all crimes are reported to the police. And over time these figures can also be influenced by changes in recording practices, differing levels of accuracy, the introduction of new offences and policy changes that impact particular types of offending.

There is also the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), which estimates the level of offending by conducting interviews with around 30,000 adults, asking them if they’ve been a victim of crime, and extrapolating the results.

The Office for Statistics Regulation says: “The CSEW is the best source for understanding long-term trends in crime covered by the survey. This is because the survey methods have changed little in the last 40 years and the survey is not affected by changes to police crime recording practices or people’s willingness to report crime to the police.”

The CSEW does have some limitations, however. It relies on respondents remembering whether they were a victim of a crime in the past 12 months, for example. And as it is a household survey, it does not take into account crimes against businesses or organisations, such as shoplifting.

For some more serious but rarer offences, the CSEW may not be the best source of data. In addition, it does not ask questions about people’s experience of crimes such as stalking or harassment. And although it does collect information about sexual offences, this is captured separately and not included in the main count.

A common claim we have seen from the Conservatives is that, since they have been in office, crime has fallen by around 50%. This figure is based on specific data from the CSEW which is subject to the limitations outlined above, and also doesn’t capture fraud or computer misuse offences, so doesn’t represent all crime.

The Reform UK election ‘contract’, meanwhile, stated there is “record crime”.

In the 12 months to December 2023, a total of 6.7 million crimes were recorded by the police in England and Wales, the highest number on record. But as outlined above, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) says police recorded crime isn’t the best data to understand trends over time, and the CSEW is a better indicator. Overall the CSEW shows a long-term decline in crime, since the mid-1990s.

Waiting lists in Scotland

Over the course of the campaign we’ve heard various claims about the number of people on NHS waiting lists in Scotland. Scottish Labour has said there are 840,000, and the Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Liberal Democrats have said “one in seven” Scots are waiting.

This misrepresents data from Public Health Scotland, which shows there are around 840,000 cases—not people—on the three main NHS waiting lists in Scotland.

We don’t know how many individual people are on these NHS waiting lists in Scotland, or what share of Scotland’s population they represent, because some are waiting for more than one thing. Public Health Scotland does not publish data on the number of individual patients on waiting lists.

Separate ONS survey figures suggest about one million people in Scotland—roughly one in five of those aged 16 and over—are waiting for something on the NHS, but this is not official NHS waiting list data.