To every Mancunian there is something special about this great city, this island of Greater Manchester.

Befittingly, Greater Manchester has a large Metropolitan Police Force GMP covering Manchester and its satellite cities of Salford, Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, Oldham, Tameside, Stockport and Trafford, all under the vigilant eyes of Labour’s Andy Burnham as the elected GM Mayor in his crucial role as the Greater Manchester Police and Fire Commissioner.

As clockwork, GMP compiles detailed monthly crime records anonymised street-by-street into 14 ‘Categories’ in all >250 GM ‘Police Neighbourhoods’ and duly submitted them to the Home Office in London, the brain and nervous system of the police under the Conservative government. Likewise, the Home Office released the monthly crime records of each and every police force in England and Wales.

The worst possible news of detective work by Greater Manchester Lib Dems is that for 42 consecutive months the Home Office has published crime statistics for Greater Manchester as relayed by GMP, scraping along the very bottom as crimeless or nearly so.

Alas not quite crime-free Heaven on Earth. Manchester Lib Dems ‘best guestimate’ is around 31,000 crime records have been missed per month by GMP in their submissions to the Home Office who then published the heavenly crime results hither and thither. The missing crime records now exceed one million. How many more missing crime records by the May local elections?

* Robin Grayson is an adviser to Greater Manchester Liberal Democrats, a former councillor on Greater Manchester County Council and former Opposition Leader on Wigan MBC. He has advised the Albanian, Mongolian, Albanian, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan governments.