Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the low clear up rate of home burglaries; and what steps they will take to address this.

The Government recognises the significant impact invasive crimes such as home burglary can have on individuals and the wider community. That is why we established the Safer Streets Fund to help prevent these crimes from happening in the first place, supporting the deployment of solutions such as home security, increased streetlighting and CCTV in high crime areas.

The Home Office is working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council to encourage forces to learn from each other and share best practice, and in June 2022 the NPCC launched the Burglary Power App to help officers gather evidence and investigate burglaries.

The Government welcomes the recent commitment given by Chief Constables and Commissioners across England and Wales that there should be police attendance at all home burglaries. We will work with the Residential Burglary Taskforce, National Police Chiefs' Council, HMICFRS and College of Policing to monitor and report on delivery against this.

To ensure police forces have sufficient resources to respond to the challenges they face we have committed to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers by March 2023, with over already16,753 in place at the end of December 2022.

The Home Office is working with partners across the criminal justice system to increase the number of cases being charged and prosecuted, and reduce the time taken to reach this point.