The percentage of solved burglaries has nearly halved in seven years across England and Wales, and in some areas fewer than one in 30 crimes are reaching court, The Times has learnt.
Police solved just over 5 per cent of burglaries last year compared with nearly 9.4 per cent in 2015, analysis of official statistics reveals.
In total there were 268,000 burglaries between April 2020 and April last year, of which only 14,000 were solved while 243,000 cases were abandoned, largely because of evidential difficulties such as problems securing CCTV recordings or a failure to find a suspect. By comparison police solved close to 32,000 of 342,043 burglaries seven years earlier in 2014-15. That year more than 301,000 were not solved and more than 8,000
