The Home Office and the police have become obsessed by targets, a government adviser has claimed.

Crime and justice adviser Louise Casey, who carried out a crime and communities review for the Home Office last year, also lamented the low public trust in official crime statistics.

In an interview with Jane's Police Review, the outspoken Casey said: "What really struck me during my review - and this is not just the police service, the Home Office is the same - is that as soon as you close down the standards unit, the next minute you know somebody tries to measure [the police] in another way."

She also criticised the police for taking too long to act on her recommendation that there be a single public confidence measure of the police.

"Of course it is important that due consideration is given to how you measure something," she said. "But [police forces and authorities] wanted freedom from bureaucracy; they wanted red tape cutting and the end of the police standards unit. They got all of that so let's just get on with the job."

Crime statistics more generally needed a "radical overhaul", she added, claiming that the Home Office's early release of knife crime statistics and use of hospital admission data against the advice of health statisticians in December would not have had any impact on public confidence.

"They do not trust the figures anyway," she said. "The irony is that public confidence in statistics is so low that it does not matter what happens with hospital figures or whatever as the public do not trust the figures.

"I mean, shock horror, there is another statistics story. It is a shock and horror for newspapers, but not for the public."