Because of a “bizarre distortion in the Government’s flagship crime figures,” three million crimes per year don’t get reported by the UK government. At fault is a decision to ignore all crimes in which the victim has previously reported five incidents in the year.

That’s right. Get robbed for the sixth time and the government just pretends it never happened.

So how bad can this be?

Violent crime is 82 per cent higher at 4.4 million offences compared with 2.4 million in the BCS, the survey claims, including a 156 per cent rise in ” acquaintance violence” from 817,000 incidents to 2.1 million.

Domestic violence is 140 per cent higher, up from 357,000 incidents a year to 857,000, the authors said, while there are nearly three million common assaults a year rather than the 1.5 million estimated by the BCS, a rise of 98 per cent.

Burglary is 20 per cent higher than currently estimated, at 877,000 a year, and vandalism is 24 per cent higher, the report calculated.

Robbery is 7 per cent up on the official estimates, or an extra 22,000 crimes bringing the yearly total to 333,000.

That’s what I call creative accounting.