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<p>In April 2012, the Home Secretary transferred the responsibility for the Crime
Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) and the publication of crime statistics to the
independent Office for National Statistics (ONS) - to ensure the public had confidence
in the statistics after years of poor data management.</p><p>A major strength of the
CSEW has been its ability to compare crime types over time back to the 1980s. As ONS
have acknowledged, over a period of time, new technologies such as the internet have
expanded the scope of existing crime types and developed new ones, particularly in
fraud and cybercrime. Therefore, following a period of extensive development work,
ONS introduced new questions to the CSEW in October 2015. ONS have said that they
will release estimates of fraud and cyber crime based on the first six months data
(October 2015 to March 2016) alongside the main statistical bulletin in July 2016
and will label them as experimental statistics.</p><p>It is important to recognise
that these data are not simply uncovering new crimes, but finding better ways of capturing
existing crimes which were not measured as well in the past.</p>
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