ASSAULTS on North Yorkshire Police officers are down, but not to the scale previously reported, force bosses have admitted.

Recent figures appeared to show a drop of 76 per cent in 2014/15 to just 46 assaults, down from 193 the previous year, making North Yorkshire's statistics among the lowest in England and Wales, behind only Cambridgeshire and Dyfed-Powys.

However, the North Yorkshire force has now said figures, which were released under the Freedom Of Information Act to national publication Police Oracle, were misleading, due to differences in the requests.

A spokeswoman for North Yorkshire Police said: "We have reassessed the figures and it seems that our figures don’t correlate with the figures Police Oracle have quoted.

"It seems that the two FOI request that were submitted for each year were worded slightly differently – so the figures for each year were not produced on a like for like basis."

The spokeswoman said that in 2013/14 34 officers were assaulted, while in 2014/15, 30 officers were assaulted, meaning the force has "seen a year on year reduction, but of 11 per cent".

She said assaults on officers could be reported a number of ways, making accurate figures difficult, but said the force was "committed to constantly reassessing and refining our processes of reporting, to assure we produce the most accurate figures possible".

Mike Stubbs, chair of the North Yorkshire Police Federation, previously said the figure was positive, but potentially misleading as he believed the figures may have been taken from the number of Health and Safety reports, rather than the number of crimes recorded.

He said: "The recording of assaults on police officers has previously been a problem in North Yorkshire where, for several years, the force was unable to provide any statistics when requested to do so. We hope that North Yorkshire Police will engage with us in this work so we can establish the true picture of the threat that our members are facing."

Nationally, the figures supplied by 35 forces suggest an average of about 38 officers a day are physically assaulted.