Police are still falling short of hitting key targets for solving crime six months after being challenged over how it planned to turn around a dip in performance.

The latest figures for April to December last year show only one in every 11 burglaries was solved by police and little more than one in six robberies detected.

The performance is better than last summer but, according to the ‘Performance Framework’, it is still missing its six key detection targets.

The collapse in crime detections last April was blamed on the restructure of the force as part of a £50 million efficiency drive.

At that point little more than 16 per cent of crime was detected. By November overall detection rates had risen to about 21 per cent.

While the performance is better than last summer, when senior officers were told they had to improve by the ruling Police Authority, only 37 per cent of serious violent crime was detected between April and December last year against a target of 50 per cent.

In the same period only nine per cent of burglaries, 15 per cent of robberies and seven per cent of car crime was detected.

Senior officers said community resolutions introduced in 2009, where the victim and the offender agree to suitable reparations for low level offences without the need to go to court, were impacting on headline detection rates.

Between April and December last year police dished out more than 9,400 such resolutions mainly for shoplifting, theft, criminal damage and minor assaults.

If they were counted in the figures, detection rates would be almost six per cent higher.

Chief Insp Matt Markham said: “We’re constantly striving to improve the service we offer to the public.

“We’ve recently undergone the largest change programme in the history of the force designed to provide a more effective and better quality service that puts the needs of the public and their satisfaction first.

“It builds on a strong bedrock of performance over recent years.

“Major organisational change does bring some degree of disruption and there will be issues that need to be ironed out.”