Knife crime rose by up to 50 per cent in rural areas in the past year as violence spread from cities, fuelled by county lines drug gangs, official figures show.

Suffolk, Norfolk, North Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Kent, Lancashire and Dyfed-Powys saw some of the biggest rises as knife crime overall in England and Wales rose by eight per cent to 43,516 offences, its highest since records began eight years ago.

At the same time, the proportion of crimes solved has fallen by half in four years, with fewer than one in 12 offences (7.8 per cent) resulting in a charge or summons. That is a fall from 9.1 per cent last year and 15 per cent four years ago.

Policing minister Nick Hurd admitted: “We are deeply concerned that certain offences, including serious violence, have increased and we are taking urgent action.

Robbery rose by 11 per cent to 85,700 offences, the number of killings increased from 693 to 701, violence against people was up 20 per cent to almost 1.7 million offences and sex crimes including rape were up by seven per cent to 162,000.

Claims that rough sleeping is falling in England should not be trusted until the government has explained how an emergency funding scheme for the worst-affected areas might have skewed the latest figures, the chair of the UK statistics Authority (UKSA) has said.

Sir David Norgrove’s comments are the latest development in a row over the apparent 2% fall in rough sleeping in England in 2018, which ministers said was a sign the government’s Rough Sleeping Initiative (RSI) was tackling the homelessness crisis.

In a significant intervention, Norgrove said the official figures for 2018 should not be used to make claims about rough sleeping in England until the government addresses concerns that some councils that received RSI funding had deliberately underreported the scale of the crisis in their area.

The gold-standard “national statistics” status has been withdrawn from police recorded crime figures following repeated allegations that some of the quarterly published figures have been subject to “a degree of fiddling”.

The UK Statistics Authority said it had taken the decision as a result of “accumulating evidence” that the underlying data on crimes recorded by the police may be unreliable.

It follows high-profile concerns over the integrity of the police crime figures raised by the Commons home affairs and public administration select committees. Her Majesty’s chief inspector of constabulary, Tom Winsor, who is to report later this year on the issue, has said he expects to find “a degree of fiddling, some of it owing to dishonesty” among the 43 police forces in England and Wales. Winsor, however, has ruled out “institutional corruption” behind the inaccurate recording of crime by the police

“Data released in parliament shows that in the most deprived areas of the country, the mortality rate is as high as 1,500 deaths per 100,000 people in a single year. By contrast the death rate is 1,427 in Rwanda and 1,452 in Botswana, according to the World Health Organization. The area with the highest death rate in England and Wales is Bryncethin in Bridgend, south Wales, with 1,499 deaths per 100,000 population in 2009.”

Something however seemed not quite right to me when I noticed that second on this list of supposedly deprived settlements judged by the number of deaths per 100,000 was a ward in Oswestry – I donwloaded the data referenced in the article and found that settlements in Stroud, North Somerset (Weston Super-Mare),  South Oxfordshire, Mid-Sussex, Hambleton, South Norfolk and West Somerset were on the top 100 list. All are Predominantly rural authorities – including some Cornish and Durham settlements there are 13 neighbourhoods in RSN eligible rural authorities on the list and over 20 from Wales.

I would not for one minute assume that there is no deprivation in these RSN authority wards however neither do I think it is credible to suggest they are amongst the 100 most deprived wards in England and Wales. On balance my suspicion is that demography has as much to do with the death rate in some of these wards as traditional measures of deprivation.

Makes you think though – if a more imaginative measure of the all round challenges facing neighbourhoods, linked to issues such as demography, were to be used to assess the overall sustainability of settlements, perhaps our thinking about the case for how funding to support challenged authorities across England should be distributed, would be both a little more sophisticated and even effective.

If you would like to see a copy of the list, with the predominantly rural neighbourhood areas picked out let me know.