BURGLARIES are higher in Teesside and North Yorkshire compared with similar parts of the country, a Home Office study has shown.

Ministers and officials yesterday unveiled what they claim is the first true assessment of how England and Wales are policed.

The Home Office has compared forces operating in similar areas to give what they say is a fairer assessment than a straightforward league table.

In North Yorkshire, 15 in every 1,000 homes will be burgled, compared with ten in other areas, such as Cumbria and Devon and Cornwall. Similarly, 36 Teesside households in every 1,000 will be broken into, a figure just above the average of 34 in comparable areas.

Vehicle crime in the two force areas are about average for their categories.

North Yorkshire, however, fares poorly when it comes to catching criminals and bringing them to justice.

Just over a fifth of offences are detected, compared with an average of more than a quarter for similar areas. The same figures apply to offences resulting in a court appearances.

Chief Constable Della Cannings emphasised North Yorkshire's achievements. But she admitted the figures ''note that certain crimes are slightly more common in similar forces and that our crime detection rate is slightly lower than in some forces."

The chief constable said she would be asking for more cash from the county's council taxpayers to change the situation.

"We want to improve our performance and we intend to," she said.

As part of the study, officials spent £70,000 to come up with "spidergrams" to show how well each police force is doing compared with similar forces elsewhere in England and Wales.

But it has raised questions about whether the public will be able to make sense of such a complex system.

Spotlight on spidergrams

Police performance monitoring "spidergrams" may be baffling to the public but they have shone a light into the strange mental workings of the Whitehall bureaucrat.

Explaining why the new method could not be used to create a national police league table, Home Office officials wrote the following in the accompanying document: "Just because one force is 'most similar' to a second force, this does not mean that the second force is most similar to the first force; the second force may actually be closer in character to a third force."

A spokesman for the Plain English Campaign said: ''To be honest, when I read that I felt like I had been hit on the head with a truncheon.

"The problem is that it shoots itself in the foot because in explaining things in such a complicated way, it gives the impression that there's some fiddling going on."