Well, The UK Has One Area Of Growth, At Least…

The number of sex offenders has increased by almost half in just five years sparking public safety concerns that they cannot all be monitored.

I wonder...

Is it because we have more sex crimes, or because things like this are now classed as sex crimes and registered, despite not posing any threat to anyone?

In some parts of the country the number of sex offenders the police now have to monitor has almost doubled, figures obtained by the Tories reveal.

It comes as the Government will today publish figures on how many serious sex or violent offenders are closely monitored under the so-called Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) .

Mmmm, and we have all seen how well they do that…

David Ruffley, the shadow policing minister, said: "The increase in the number of sex offenders being registered is a sign of progress but it also underlines the need to allow police to do their jobs."

It's a sign of progress that we now have more and more people on the SOR? Even people who do what they do behind locked doors and with no other person present?

This must be some odd new definition of the word 'progress' I've not come across so far...

But the probation union has warned changes in the way the Mappa statistics are presented will give a false impression that there has been a fall in the number of serious violent offenders.

Previous reports have provided data on the total number of people who go through Mappa in any one year but today's report is expected to give a snapshot from a single day, understood to be March 31.

As a result it is expected to show a sharp fall in the number of violent offenders under Mappa but critics said it is misleading.

The government fiddling the figures? Perish the thought!

Harry Fletcher, assistant general secretary of Napo, the Probation Union, said: "The Mappa figures will show a huge decline in the number of violent offenders under supervision, by 50 per cent.

"However, on close inspection, this is because the Ministry has changed the way they record statistics. There has not been a fall in crime, in fact, the reverse. There has probably been an increase."

I don't think there's much of a 'probably' about it, but frankly, I'd rather they concentrated their attention on real threats, and not on people who mistook the expression 'She's the office bike and a bit of a goer!' to mean something quite different...