Crime fell by one third under the last Labour government.
This claim is missing context. While we don’t have comparable data covering different administrations, according to the central crime survey measure, crime levels peaked prior to Labour taking office and have been declining since.
After 13 years the Conservative party hasn’t had an achievement like the introduction of the minimum wage.
While Labour was responsible for the introduction of the National Minimum Wage Act in 1998, the Conservative government did introduce a higher minimum wage rate, called the National Living Wage, in 2016.
In his keynote speech at the Labour party conference today (10 October) party leader Sir Keir Starmer spoke about the record of the last Labour government, compared to that of the Conservatives since 2010.
We’ve fact checked two of the claims he made below. You can watch his speech back here, or read the transcript here.
"Crime down by a third."
In comparing Labour’s record in government with that of the Conservatives since 2010, Mr Starmer appeared to claim that under Labour, crime was “down by a third”. We’ve asked Mr Starmer and Labour to clarify exactly what this is based on.
According to the Crime Survey of England and Wales, levels of crime peaked in 1995 but have been declining ever since.
Around 17.2 million offences were recorded in the year to December 1997 and this number fell to 9.5 million in the year to March 2010, a fall of around 45%. These figures exclude crime involving fraud and computer misuse which were not counted in the crime survey until 2017.
This means it is not possible to directly compare overall crime figures before and after this period.
When these offences are excluded, overall crime has continued to fall under the Conservative government. There were about 9.7 million offences in the year to March 2011 and 4.4 million offences in the year to March 2023, a fall of 45%.
Fraud and computer misuse offences have also declined since they began to be recorded, falling from 5.1 million in the year to March 2017 to 4.2 million in the year to March 2023.
Falling crime rates are not unique to England and Wales—similar declines across similar time periods have been seen across the Western world, meaning they are hard to attribute to the actions of any government. The cause of the fall is uncertain.
"It's been thirteen years now and what does Britain have to show for it? Where is their minimum wage?"
Mr Starmer criticised the Conservative government’s record, asking “where is their minimum wage?”
The National Minimum Wage Act 1998 was passed by a Labour government, coming into force on 1 April 1999. It set out that workers in the UK who were no longer of compulsory school age must be paid a national minimum wage, set at an hourly rate, by their employers.
The National Minimum Wage originally only applied to workers aged at least 18, with a higher rate for those aged 22 and over, before an additional, lower minimum wage rate came into force for 16-17 year-olds in October 2004.
On 1 October 2010 the age for the highest minimum wage rate was lowered to 21, and a lower Apprentice minimum wage was also introduced following recommendations from the Low Pay Commission, an independent body which advises the government about the minimum wage.
It is worth pointing out however, that a Conservative government did create the National Living Wage, which took effect in 2016, establishing a new, higher minimum wage, known as the living wage, for workers aged 25 and over. At the time the government estimated that over one million workers would benefit from the new rate.
Image courtesy of Chris McAndrew
Correction 12 October 2023
We corrected a percentage calculation in this article to 45% instead of 55%
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