Police drop one criminal investigation every 13 seconds as number of probes abandoned without a suspect being established soars by 30 per cent

Police abandoned a criminal investigation every 13 seconds without finding the culprit last year.

The number of criminal inquiries dropped without a suspect being identified has soared by 30 per cent in just two years, new Home Office figures show.

More than 2.3million investigations were abandoned in 2023 without the perpetrator being found - more than four every minute and almost 6,500 each day.

This is up by almost a third when compared to 2021 when more than 1.8 million probes were closed without a suspect.

The investigations dropped included hundreds of thousands into violent offences and burglaries.

The figures raise serious questions about whether the taxpayer is receiving value for money for the billions injected into policing the Government’s uplift programme.

The programme has seen the number of officers in England and Wales increase from 129,110 at the end of March 2020 to 149,164 by last September.

The Home Office has spent almost £4billion on the election pledge to hire 20,000 officers and expects to spend a further £18.5billion on the wage bill over the next ten years.

Last year, police were almost six times more likely to drop an investigation than make a charge.

For offences including robbery and criminal damage, more than half of investigations ended with no suspect being identified and the perpetrator escaping justice.

Forces were unable to find a suspect in more than 80 per cent of residential burglaries and thefts.

Cases of violent assault and sexual assault were closed without finding a suspect 18 per cent of the time, the figures show.

This means that criminals went unidentified following 350,000 violent assault investigations and 33,000 cases of sexual assault.

And a shocking 1.4million investigations into thefts were abandoned.

Given there are 525,600 minutes in a year, the statistics show that 4.5 investigations were closed every minute in 2023 - or one probe dropped every 13 seconds without a suspect being found.