
The Scottish Government continues to be criticised by opposition parties over its record on crime and justice.
On social media, the Scottish Conservatives suggested new crime statistics showed criminals were “reaping the rewards of the SNP’s soft touch on justice”.
Just less than half of all crimes were unsolved last year.
The Scottish Conservatives
Ferret Fact Service looked at this claim and found it Mostly True.

Evidence
The claim refers to the latest data released by Police Scotland and the Scottish Government on so-called ‘clear up rates’.
A crime is considered ‘cleared up’ when there is enough evidence to consider criminal proceedings against the person accused. However, while the public might only consider a crime solved if someone is successfully convicted, there does not need to be a successful criminal prosecution for a crime to be ‘cleared up’.
The number of crimes that result in successful convictions is in fact significantly lower than the ‘clear up’ rate.
Some crimes are ‘cleared up’ very quickly because the offender is caught in the act, such as motoring offences when the act is spotted by a police officer. Others can take years, including murder or financial crimes.
To find out the clear up rate, statisticians take the total number of crimes that are considered to be ‘cleared up’ in a certain year, and compare that to the number of crimes committed in that year. This is expressed as a percentage, which gives us the annual clear up rate.
However, it is not accurate to say that clear up rates show the percentage of crimes committed that year that were solved.
For example, a murder committed in 2018 might only be cleared up in 2021, which means it would count towards the 2021 ‘clear up rate’. While a crime committed in 2021 that remained unsolved by the end of that year would not be included.
How have clear up rates changed over time?
In 2023-24, the clear up rate was 54.1 per cent, up 0.8 percentage points from 2022-23. Since 2014-15, the overall rate has stayed fairly steady, aside from 2020-21 when it peaked at 59.3 per cent during the Covid-19 lockdown period.
The Scottish Conservatives claim is accompanied by an image of the front page of the Scottish Daily Mail newspaper with the headline “SNP’s pitiful record on crime exposed: Nationalists savaged over police cuts as clear-up rates plummet”.
Clear up rates have reduced for some types of crime but increased for others. In 2014-15, the clear up rate for non-sexual violent crimes was 77 per cent, whereas the latest figures showed a 68 per cent rate.
For sexual crimes, the clear up rate has reduced from 76.5 per cent in 2014-15 to 57.2 per cent last year.
Housebreaking has seen a slight increase over the same period, from 25 to 27 per cent, while clear up of crimes under the category of damage and reckless behaviour have also increased from 22.8 to 29.6 per cent.
Across the categories, there have been small increases in the last year. The clear up rate for non-sexual crimes of violence increased from 67.3 to 68 per cent, while for sexual crimes the increase over the last year was from 53.4 per cent to 57.2 per cent.
Ferret Fact Service verdict: Mostly True
The Scottish Conservatives claim that “just less than half of all crimes” were unsolved last year is accurate, but needs context. While the clear up rate in 2023-24 was 54 per cent, this does not mean that 46 per cent of crimes committed last year went unsolved. This figure comes from the number of crimes cleared up in 2023-24 compared to the total number of crimes in that year. Some of the crimes cleared up were from previous years.
A crime being ‘cleared up’ does not mean someone has been convicted of the crime, but that there is enough evidence to justify criminal proceedings.

Ferret Fact Service (FFS) is a non-partisan fact checker, and signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network fact-checkers’ code of principles.
All the sources used in our checks are publicly available and the FFS fact-checking methodology can be viewed here.
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