Scale

Home Office estimates, developed to assess the cost of crime, offer the most recent and comprehensive view of overall levels of business crime.

The estimates show public and commercial sector organizations experiencing in the region of 35 million offences in the year 1999/2000.

This figure includes public sector as well as commercial organizations but excludes fraud and forgery (estimated at a further 9 million offences).

In numerical terms, shop thefts account for the vast majority of offences. Drawing on studies of shoplifting, the study makes a cautious assumption of 100 offences committed for every offence recorded by the police. This produces an estimate of 29 million shop thefts compared to a police recorded crime figure of 292,000 incidents, and the 4 million incidents reported in the 1999 Retail Crime Survey.

Click here for a table showing the scale of business crime.

Source: S Brand & R Price, (2000) The economic and social costs of crime, Home Office Research Series Paper 217, London, Home Office Link to www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/hors217.pdf

Violence at work

Based on the British Crime Survey:

• just over 1.2 million incidents of violence at work occurred in England and Wales in 1997

• of these, 523,000 were physical assaults and 703,000 threats by members of the public against people who were working

• 649,000 workers in England and Wales (or 2.8% of working adults) experienced at least one violent incident while working.

Source: Budd, T (1999) Violence at work: Findings from the British Crime Survey, Home Office Occasional Paper www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/occ-violencework.pdf

Comparison with domestic crime

The Home Office estimate of crimes against commercial and public sector organizations is almost twice the estimated number of crimes against individuals and households.

Other studies show that business premises have a much higher risk of burglary and repeat burglary, vandalism and vehicle crime than domestic premises.

Click to view table
Source: Mirlees-Black, C and Ross, A (1995) Crime against Retail and Manufacturing Premises: Findings from the 1994 Commercial Victimisation Survey, Home Office Research Study No. 146, London, Home Office.

A study of burglary in Merseyside found that nearly 24% of non-residential properties had been burgled at least once in the twelve-month period compared to 3.3% of residential properties.

[Bowers, K J, Hirschfield, A & Johnson, S (1998) ‘Victimisation Revisited: A Case Study of Non-residential Repeat Burglary in Merseyside’, British Journal of Criminology Vol.38 No. 3]

In the Scottish Business Crime Survey the likelihood of any business premises suffering a break-in was some six times greater than a private house.

Crimes against businesses have been shown to cost more than crimes against private individuals. The Home Office costs of crime estimates give the following differences in the average cost of incidents:

Average cost of crime incidents

Source: S Brand & R Price, (2000) The economic and social costs of crime, Home Office Research Series Paper 217, London, Home Office Link to www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs/hors217.pdf