Too many people don’t realise that postcodes are ever evolving, new ones being created, deleted and restored. Nothing more irritating than buying a dataset with a missing or non-valid postcode. We always stay up to date on postcodes here, as soon as they are released, every 3-4 months. So you can rely on our data for being current. Here is a new postcodes from that selection for you to cross-reference with anyone else YO89TS;

http://www.ukcrimestats.com/Postcode/yo89ts

It does mean of course that with new postcodes, we won’t yet have any energy consumption (from 2015) or property sales data to show.

There were also 2,568 deletions and 1,118 postcodes restored.

There were a few stories recently in the media about how Police are now officially not investigating shoplifting of items valued under £200. I fully understand the need for a cut-off point in order to focus on crimes that do greater damage. I just don’t see the need to publicise and legislate for what it is.

Discretion ought to be at play here rather than a top-down, one size fits all directive. And there must be other solutions to be explored that could work as well or even better than Police investigations for our shopkeepers.

Anyway, I’ve lifted the data from our National Picture page from January 2013 (when our data for Northern Ireland starts) to the latest month November 2017 and added a linear trendline. In percentage terms we are clearly going up, with most of the increase since th the introduction of the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014.

How times flies when it’s Christmas !

The Home Office released the November 2017 data early this month, (perhaps as a Christmas present?) so we updated on 22nd December. We also updated our crime postcode radius datasets covering all postcodes which you can purchase for immediate download here.

We have just updated the website to show the latest crime figures for October 2017. I’ve been looking at all our Octobers going back to 2011 and this is the highest one yet by total of reported ASB and crime at 585,734. The overall percentage difference is 7% greater than October 2016, but in the breakdown of category – Public Order has the greatest percentage increase at 36%, followed by Robbery at 30%. The greatest decrease was in ASB incidents by 10%, followed by Bike Theft at 5%. The great recession of 2008-09 was unusual in that crime actually fell throughout it and kept falling afterwards (and unemployment remained surprisingly low too). It seems that crime is drifting up again but that has to be weighed against a larger population – about 4-5 million more than in 2008. There may also have been more crimes actually reported and recorded than in the past – a factor not to be under-estimated.

As always, caution required because the latest month is always incomplete. But looking at the history – which we have until Jan 1995 – it has been at least 10 years since transactions cleared 100k a month, today we are more like 80k or less. The 20%+ decline in churn has definitely had an impact on housing availability and increasing it would be far more significant imho than building new supply in the short term.

Crime for October should be available from about mid-December.