The Tories are using the analysis to promote their crime policies, with a pledge to hire an extra 10,000 police officers, backed by £650m funding, over three years.
They would also launch a campaign of intense hotspot police patrolling in 2000 areas with the highest rates of violent crime and robbery in an attempt to prevent some 35,000 offences.
They would rewrite police rules to make it easier for officers to stop and search suspected criminals by lowering the threshold for using the tactic and expanding the use of powers to stop without any suspicion.
They estimate this would triple the number of stops and searches from 535,000 in 2024 to over 1.5 million.
Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, said: “It’s never comfortable to put a price on crime, but these figures expose the scale of Labour’s failure. They measure not just money lost but lives damaged by a Labour Government that has let law and order fall apart.
“[Prime Minister] Keir Starmer does not have the backbone to stand up and take the difficult decisions Britain needs. Now he’s paralysed, too frightened to face down the soft-left activists who think criminals are victims and victims are statistics.
“The real crime is what Labour have done to our country. A country left less safe, less secure, and less certain that justice still means something. The Conservatives will restore that certainty – putting control back in the hands of the law, not the lawless.”
An estimate of the financial cost of crime was first conducted by the Home Office in 2018 based on three factors: “anticipation” of crime such as the cost of burglar alarms; “consequences” such as stolen or damaged property; and “response” including costs to the police and the criminal justice system.
Homicide accounted individually for the highest “unit cost” of £3.2m per killing but with the number of homicides proportionately lower than other crimes, the net changes in rates have little effect on the overall cost.
Figures this month showed homicides at a record low of 518 offences in England and Wales.
Rape accounted for the second highest cost at £39,360 per individual, followed by violence with injury at £14,050, robbery at £11,320 and theft of a vehicle at £10,290.
Crime trends over the past seven years have been mixed, with fraud pushing overall crime rates up while offences such as burglary, violence with injury, and gun crime are down. Shoplifting and sexual offences have risen to record highs in the past year.
Using Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, the Tories calculated that the cost of fraud had reached £2.3b and the cost of rape and other sexual offences had risen to nearly £5.2b – an increase in over £500m in the last year alone. The cost of robbery stood at more than £1.2b.
The Tories claimed that, based on their analysis, the cost of crime fell by £16b from nearly £49bn in 2018 to its current rate of £33b.
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