You asked
Please provide the total number of homicides per year in the United Kingdom starting from January 1980?
Would it also be possible to break those numbers down by murder weapon type i.e firearms, knives?
We said
Thank you for your request for homicide data.
We report on homicides using Home Office Homicide Index which contains detailed record-level information about each homicide recorded by police in England and Wales. These figures provide a high level of detail about the nature and circumstances of homicide offences than the main police recorded crime dataset.
Our most recent statistics on homicides in England and Wales can be found in our publication Homicide in England and Wales: year ending March 2019. You can find a time series of the total number of homicides per year in England and Wales from the year ending December 1969 to the year ending March 2019 in Appendix Table 1.
A breakdown of the number of homicides by apparent method of killing from the year ending March 2009 to the year ending March 2019 can also be found in Table 6a of the Appendix tables.
It should be noted that our statistics only cover England and Wales. For the latest statistics on homicides in Scotland, the Scottish government has published Homicide in Scotland 2018-2019: statistics. For homicide data from Northern Ireland, you can contact the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), they are contactable at this email address zCSUwebstats@psni.pnn.police.uk.