Ministers' claims to have slashed crime are based on misleading evidence that masks thousands of 'missing offences' that go undetected by police and never reach the criminal justice system, a controversial new study of government statistics reveals.

Home Secretary David Blunkett says crime has been cut by 25 per cent under Labour and that the chance of becoming a victim of it is at its lowest for 20 years.
But the report to be published later this month by the Crime and Society Foundation, a new criminal justice think-tank, will claim that the official crime statistics are an unreliable measure of the true level of offences.