Crime 'down by 10%' in England and Wales

According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales in the year to September 2013:

• Sexual offences recorded by the police increased by 17%. This was attributed by the ONS to the so-called "Yewtree effect", suggesting a greater number of victims have come forward to report historical sexual offences in the wake of high-profile cases of alleged offending by celebrities.

• Household crime was down 10%, while personal crime was down 9%.
• There were 859,000 crimes experienced by children aged 10 to 15.

Police recorded 3.7 million offences in the year to September 2013, a decrease of 3% compared with the previous year, the Office for National Statistics has said.

However, police-recorded crime figures were last week stripped of an official "gold standard" mark by the statistics watchdog amid mounting concern they were being "fiddled" by police.

These are the first batch of statistics to be published since the UK Statistics Authority removed the National Statistics designation from all crime data recorded by the police.

Crime against households and adults in England and Wales fell 10% in the year to September, official figures have revealed, the lowest level since the survey began 32 years ago.

According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, there were about eight million incidents of crime against households and adults in the period.

Crime against households and adults in England and Wales fell 10% to about eight million incidents in the year to September 2013, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales.