Professor John Robertson OBA

The Daily Record, the Herald and the Scotsman are now fully dedicated to platforming Scottish Labour’s stash of manipulated Freedom of Information data on any aspect of public service that might look bad for the SNP Government.

Recently, it’s been police officers giving up on the job or failing training courses. I could try to dig into these and find the usual lack of any methodology and sneaky fiddling with the figures, I’ve found several times in the past, but it’s wasted effort because none of that matters.

This does:

First, see graph above, Scotland has more than 25% more police officers per 1 000 population, to fight crime than England & Wales. The Northern Ireland* figure is a legacy of the Troubles and will soon fall below that of Scotland. https://policepromotion.blog/2025/08/02/inside-the-uks-police-workforce-2025-strength/

From the same source, we can also see that Scotland has around 3 times as many promoted staff.

Key: Red – England and Wales; Blue – Scotland; Green – Northern Ireland

Second, despite or because of its far better staffing ratio, crime in Scotland:

England and Wales (combined): 87.2 crimes per 1,000 population (year ending March 2025, excluding some categories like fraud in certain measures; overall recorded crimes around 6.59 million). https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales

Scotland: 54.5 crimes per 1,000 population (year ending March 2025; 545 per 10,000 population, based on 299,111 recorded crimes). https://www.gov.scot/publications/recorded-crime-scotland-2024-25/

Northern Ireland: Approximately 50-52 crimes per 1,000 population (around 95,968-96,000 recorded crimes in recent periods, with rates cited between 49.8 and 52.1 depending on inclusion of fraud). https://www.psni.police.uk/about-us/our-publications-and-reports/official-statistics/police-recorded-crime-statistics

The crime rate in England & Wales is thus a massive 60% higher than in Scotland.

Finally, from the same sources, violent crime? England and Wales – 32.3 per 1 000; Scotland – only 13 per 1000!