England and Wales Crime Level Holds at 9.6 Million Incidents

ONS survey data show headline crime in England and Wales was unchanged between the years ending March 2025 and March 2026, following a sharp fraud-driven rise the previous year.

The Office for National Statistics estimates 9.6 million incidents of headline crime in England and Wales for the year ending March 2026 — the same figure as the year before. The figures show no statistically significant change between the two periods, according to an ONS post published this week.

That stability follows a sharper move in the previous year. The CSEW recorded around 9.4 million headline crime incidents in the year ending March 2025, itself a 7 per cent increase compared with 8.8 million in the year ending March 2024. The driver was fraud: an estimated 4.2 million fraud incidents were recorded in the year ending March 2025 — a 31 per cent rise and the highest level since fraud was first included in the survey in the year ending March 2017.

Headline crime in the CSEW covers theft, robbery, criminal damage, fraud, computer misuse, and violence with or without injury. It doesn’t capture everything — sexual offences are measured separately. ONS data for the year ending March 2025 show that around 900,000 people aged 16 and over, or 1.9 per cent of that age group, were estimated victims of sexual assault including attempts. Police recorded sexual offences rose 11 per cent to 209,079 in the same period, partly due to new offences introduced under the Online Safety Act 2023.

For Kent households and businesses, the national picture matters — but the county’s own patterns can diverge. Fraud and computer misuse, which now account for a large share of all headline crime nationally, tend to reach people through online scams, telephone fraud, and cybercrime. Kent Police, Kent County Council, and local community safety partnerships draw on both ONS survey data and police recorded crime figures when deciding where to direct resources, though those two sources can tell different stories.

A stable national total doesn’t mean the burden of crime has eased. At 9.6 million incidents, the level remains well above the 8.8 million recorded two years ago — and the CSEW is designed specifically to capture offences that never get reported to the police at all.