The Mayor of London has hit back after being blamed for the police’s failure to solve 80 per cent of reported crimes in Waltham Forest.

Jennette Arnold, Labour member for Hackney, Islington and Waltham Forest, said this week that data released by the Greater London Authority shows that in 2012-13 only 20 per cent of crimes were solved.

This figure, amounting to 19,502 unsolved crimes, sits below the national average of 27 per cent.

Just fewer than one in five rape cases were solved in that period, as well as 13 per cent of robbery offences, seven per cent of burglaries and six per cent of frauds and forgeries.
More than 90 per cent of drugs offences were solved.

Neighbouring Hackney and nearby Islington also had an unsolved crime rate of 80 per cent last year.

Ms Arnold says less crime in the borough is being solved than when Boris Johnson became Mayor in 2008-9, when the rate was 25 per cent.

“This proves Boris can’t have his cake and eat it. If you cut the police budget by as much as the Government has then there will be repercussions,” she said.

“Victim satisfaction in London is lower than elsewhere in the UK and this is not acceptable.
“The Mayor must act now.”

According to Ms Arnold’s Labour group the rate of solved crime in Waltham Forest has dropped by around 1 per cent each year since 2008 – shadowing a similar trend across London.

Across the entire Metropolitan Police only 21 per cent of crimes were solved in 2012/13.

Anne Boriel, whose fiancée Wayne Powell was murdered in Chingford in 2010, says she is devastated by the ongoing mystery surrounding his death.

“Every day you wake up you’re thinking about the same thing – when are you going to get some news,” she said.

“When I watch other cases where they’ve caught people it breaks my heart.”

A spokeswoman for the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime said: “Since the Mayor was elected in 2008 crime in the capital has fallen and it continues to fall at a faster rate than the rest of the country, delivering on our target of reducing neighbourhood crime by 20 per cent by 2016.

“We are working closely with the Met to improve detection rates and the Commissioner has said he wants to see these increased to one in three.”

The figures were released on the London Datastore website, which is maintained by the Greater London Authority, and by the Metropolitan Police.

Waltham Forest police have declined to comment at this stage.