United Kingdom

Every metric we have, prime minister by prime minister, since 1945. Plus data on this country alone, to start “friendly” arguments.

In office Andy Burnham since 20 July 2026

Knife crime · Cases per 100,000 people

Selected offences in which a knife or a sharp instrument was used: homicide, attempted murder, threats to kill, assaults, robbery, rape and sexual assault.

The line starts in 2019, when a new method of counting began. The Metropolitan Police corrected its counting from April 2024 without revising earlier years. England and Wales only. The police count years from April to March: a year here is the one most of its months fall in. Our calculation, with the ONS's mid-year estimate of England and Wales for the year's first calendar year.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Offences involving the use of weapons: data tables, year ending March 2026, Table 21 (police recorded crime from the Home Office) (updated 2026-10-22) · fetched 1 Nov 2026 · Open Government Licence v3.0

Years

The series cover England and Wales: Scotland and Northern Ireland count crime under their own rules, so the United Kingdom has no single figure. They are the offences the police recorded, which the Home Office collects and the ONS publishes. They count only what is recorded: many crimes are never reported, and how fully the police record changed over the years.

A year counts for whoever was in office on 1 July. A term's change runs from the year before it began to its last year with data. The years above, or a name in the timeline, set the years of the chart and of every list below. The dashed line and the small change under each term are the comparison group, over the same years. BRICS, the G7 and the G20 are the average of their member countries, and count only in years when every member has data.

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    Leaders, dates and parties: Wikipedia, compiled by Data Mechanics · loaded 1 Nov 2026. Party logos from Wikimedia Commons.

    Portrait of Klaus Jürgen Folz

    About the author

    Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.