It should not need to be said, but when a crime is committed the offence should be properly investigated, and when a culprit is identified they should be prosecuted. Anything less and faith in the criminal justice system itself begins to collapse. It is the most basic of expectations – nobody should be permitted to get away with a crime if they can reasonably be brought to justice.

New figures, however, show that the police are solving the lowest proportion of crimes since records began. Home Office statistics indicate that, in the year to September 2021, only 6 per cent of all crimes in England and Wales resulted in a charge or summons. This is equivalent to just one in 17 being solved. It comes at a time when reported cases for certain offences – such as rape – have been rising sharply.

The most common reason for a case being closed was no suspect being identified – which happened in an extraordinary 1.6 million cases. Even for what are often erroneously labelled “minor” offences, such as burglary, it is dispiriting for victims if the police do not appear to make every effort to identify the culprit.

There is a wider feeling that the police are not fulfilling the role the public expects them to play. Nearly half of people now report never seeing bobbies patrolling the streets.

A separate problem is the backlog in the courts, after their operations were restricted during lockdown. Ministers have proposed a series of measures designed to clear it and to ensure that justice is not delayed unnecessarily. They should consider whether further action is needed, since victims’ groups blame the low conviction rates for crimes such as rape in part on how long it can take for cases to come to trial.

But after a period of relative austerity, more money is being poured into policing and criminal justice and thousands of extra police officers are being hired. So it is not good enough to blame lack of funds, even though forces say they are having to deal with more complex offences, as well as a rising tide of online crimes.

Many people are frustrated that resources have been diverted into fashionable areas such as investigating so-called “non-crime hate incidents” and the policing of perfectly legitimate speech. How can that be justified when police forces are failing to solve crimes that the public consider to be a priority?