FOI Ref: FOI/2022/4644
You asked
In reference to your Crime Survey for England and Wales, please provide the following information:
1) Why are the ONS surveys every three years & not annually?
2) Why are the ONS surveys based on such small sample groups?
3) Wouldn't an increased frequency & sample size of survey serve to generate very necessary conversations as well as the statistical benefits?
We said
Thank you for your enquiry.
The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW), formerly known as the British Crime Survey, has been running as a continuous survey since 2001. Prior to that, it had run at mostly two-year intervals since it went live in 1981.
The CSEW is designed to yield interviews with a nationally representative sample of around 35,000 households in England and Wales each year.
The CSEW is conducted via in-home interviews with respondents. As such, interviewing for the survey was suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic. During this time the survey was replaced with the Telephone-operated crime survey (TCSEW) to enable the ONS to continue to produce estimates of crime. However, questions related to experiences of rape and sexual assault were removed from the survey with the move to telephone interviewing because of concerns around confidentiality and respondent safety.
The CSEW returned to in-home interviewing from October 2021 and these questions were re-instated. The latest estimates from the CSEW on the prevalence of sexual assault can be found in our Other related tables: year ending March 2022. These estimates are based on six months of data collected between October 2021 and March 2022. Caution should be taken when using these data because of the impact of the reduced data collection period and lower response rates on the quality of estimates.
Now that we are back interviewing respondents face-to-face, we hope to start releasing our annual publication on sexual offences again early next year. The full annual sample will provide larger sample sizes than were available for the first 6 months of data collection. We will continue to consider user requirements for data on sexual offences and look for a wide range of data sources to use in our publications, not just from the criminal justice system but also the voluntary sector.
The ONS Centre for Crime and Justice are looking into ways in which we may boost our sample. In any redesign of the survey, we seek to ensure that it continues to meet the needs of our users.
Over the summer of 2022 we consulted users on the planned redesign of the survey. You can find our response to the consultation available here.
More information about the current CSEW sample design can be found in the User guide to crime statistics in England and Wales and technical report.