A SERIES of crime and detection league tables comparing Greater Manchester with five similar police force areas paints a bleak picture of law and order across the region.

Greater Manchester Police has come under fire from members of the region’s police authority after the area ranked either bottom or next to bottom in four national tables produced from the results of the annual British Crime Survey.

The tables showed that the area suffered from a higher rate of so-called ‘acquisitive crime’ – which includes robbery, burglary and car crime – than the five other English forces judged to be most similar.

It also came bottom in the proportion of these crimes which are detected.

It came next to bottom in a table of ‘most serious’ violent crime and also in the detection rate for these crimes. The tables, which compare GMP to forces in Merseyside, Northumbria, South Yorkshire, West Midlands and West Yorkshire, were presented to members of Greater Manchester Police Authority yesterday.

The four tables also showed that the ‘North Manchester’ police division, which covers the city centre and the north of the city, fared worst in a group of the 15 most challenging police divisions across the country in the same ‘acquisitive’ crime and violent crime categories.

Force bosses insist Greater Manchester has more crime than other areas of the country because it has some of the most deprived areas.

It is understood that the figures were originally due to be considered in a part of the meeting from which the press and public were barred. But officials, on behalf of the chair of the police authority, Coun Paul Murphy, moved them to the public section of the meeting.

Chief Constable Peter Fahy also revealed at the meeting that GMP still had the highest burglary rate of anywhere in the country, despite huge operations recently to crack down on house-breakers. He said the burglary rate in Greater Manchester was ‘something we need to understand’.

Authority chairman Coun Murphy described the rate of burglary as ‘staggering’, adding: “There’s huge concern both here and at the Home Office. It’s something we have to put right.”

Speaking about the league tables, independent police authority member Ian Hargreaves, said: “It’s depressing chair isn’t it? I hear about a catalogue of initiatives but when can we expect to see significant improvement? That’s what I want as a member of the authority and I’m not getting any sense of that at all.”

Mr Fahy pointed to a series of operations, more arrests, a stronger focus on neighbourhood policing, greater public confidence in the police and also improved handling of emergency calls.

He said: “There’s a huge amount of work going on. There are some good arrests and there were significant criminals convicted at Manchester Crown Court just on Friday.”

He added that at the same time the force had embarked on an ambitious programme of modernisation to reduce bureaucracy and speed up police work.

Mr Fahy said: “There’s nobody more critical of the force than I am. I have made it absolutely clear that the level of crime in Greater Manchester is unacceptable. When you look at burglary it’s absolutely unacceptable.

“We are monitoring performance on a week-by-week and month-by-month basis and at the same time there’s a huge change programme.”

Coun David Lancaster, who represents Salford, said: “I was around when these targets were set and they weren’t exactly stretching targets.”

Mr Fahy said there was ‘robust monitoring’ of the figures with divisions held to account every week.

After the meeting, force bosses pointed to the huge number of students in the city as one reason for the high burglary rate.

They also argued the force was a far more deprived and challenging area to police than the other forces it is regularly compared with.