Crime becomes an election issue in Tory heartland of Surrey

When Terry Gibbs returned with his family to find his home near Esher in outer London being burgled last year, he called the police — only to be told “nobody could come”.

“[They said] ‘You’ll just have to enter with caution’,” he recalled.

Although police came the next day to take fingerprints, the force — Surrey Constabulary — has the second-worst record for solving burglaries in England and Wales.

Rising public concerns about crime — and the perceived inability of police forces to prevent or solve them — have propelled law and order up the political agenda during the election campaign.

One in five people told polling company YouGov earlier this month that they were concerned about crime — double the level who raised the topic in a regular survey on important issues last January.

These worries are shared in the Esher and Walton constituency, a Tory heartland represented until this year by former deputy prime minister Dominic Raab, who is stepping down.

Monica Harding, the Liberal Democrat candidate for the constituency, said she had been picking up concerns about burglaries for “a good two, three years”.

The Liberal Democrats — for whom Gibbs’s wife was elected as a local councillor in May — have pledged a “burglary response guarantee”, which would oblige police to attend every break-in.

The Labour party has vowed to tackle antisocial behaviour, partly by recruiting police officers and support staff, while the Conservatives have pledged to recruit 8,000 more police officers in England and Wales, on top of the 20,000 added since 2019 as part of a recruitment drive.

Despite an influx of recruits, police numbers in England and Wales — including backroom staff such as analysts — remain 10,000 lower than they were in 2010 because of a sharp drop between 2010 and 2017 as budgets were cut.

“A big reduction in the number of officers just meant they couldn’t follow up as much crime,” said Rick Muir, director of the Police Foundation think-tank.

The result is that three-quarters of reported burglaries in England and Wales in the year to September 2023 remain unsolved. In Surrey, the figure was 82 per cent, the worst record of any force except South Yorkshire.

Conviction rates are even lower: only 3.9 per cent of burglaries reported to police forces in the year to March 2023 resulted in a charge or court summons, figures from the Office for National Statistics show. The figure was 6.6 per cent in the year to March 2015, the first year for which comparable figures are available.

Falling officer numbers and increased demands from other cases — especially mental health call-outs and sexual harassment investigations — have drained resources that could historically have been dedicated to solving visible crimes such as burglary, according to policing specialists.

Dal Babu, a former senior officer in London’s Metropolitan Police, said last decade’s cuts that sapped numbers had also led to a more inexperienced force.

About a quarter of officers currently have less than five years’ experience, while forces are struggling to retain newly recruited officers, he said.

“You have a very, very inexperienced police force, led by very, very inexperienced leaders,” he added.

Yet the already-stretched resources are also increasingly being diverted to new types of cases.

Ben Bradford, professor of global city policing at University College London, said officers had been left handling issues such as mental health crises that would previously have been tackled by other public services before the austerity cuts under the post-2010 Conservative-led coalition government.

“The police no longer act as a service of last resort, but of first resort,” he said, calling the mental health workload a “huge issue” for police.

Muir, from the Police Foundation, said forces were also handling a big rise in reports of sexual offences as a result of the “Me Too” movement, which had encouraged women who had previously been assaulted to come forward to report past incidents.

“They had this trebling of sexual crime being reported,” Muir said. “Those things are more complicated to investigate.”

Conversely, all this comes against a backdrop of burglary rates that are actually falling.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales showed burglary numbers in the two nations in 2023 were 12 per cent down on those for 2022. The incidence of burglary in the survey — the most reliable gauge of levels of common crimes — has fallen by 83 per cent since its peak in 1993.

John Cope, the Conservative candidate for Esher and Walton, said the number of police officers in Surrey was at a record high.

“Being burgled is one of the worst, most intrusive things that can happen, which is why Surrey Police attend all burglaries,” he said.

Gibbs and other victims of crime, however, reported feeling little benefit from the rising force numbers.

The thieves who burgled the Gibbs’s house were never caught, and the family’s two heirloom signet rings that were among the stolen items were never recovered. “It was pretty devastating for us,” said Gibbs.

Karen Hazelden, from Hinchley Wood, also in the Esher and Walton constituency, said police did not seem “bothered or interested” after thieves broke in on the day of her father’s funeral and stole irreplaceable family jewellery in 2018. Although officers came the following day to collect fingerprints, the response was “pretty ineffective, really”, she added.

Surrey Constabulary insisted that, in line with a policy set by the National Police Chiefs’ Council in October 2022, officers always attend residential burglaries. Even in cases where there was initially too little evidence to find an offender, information would be retained in case further evidence came to light later, the force added.

Former Met officer Babu said he hoped the lessons of the experiences of such disillusioned crime victims would be learned by whichever party wins power in the election — and that forces would get “back to basics”.

He added: “It’s about ensuring you’ve got a sufficient workforce that are trained, that have sufficient resources and are putting those resources into fighting crime.”