Is crime surging in Britain? A response to Nigel Farage

It's Reform vs the data. Who will win?

Nigel Farage has opened Week Two of his ‘Lawless Britain’ press conference by referencing my work on crime data, which seems to have annoyed him. Here’s what he had to say:-

“Before I start, there has been some questioning of the crime figures that we’ve been talking about - in particular by Fraser Nelson, who’s not in the room. Fraser seems to think that crime is going down, and that all is well with the world and there’s absolutely nothing to worry about at all. Well, he’s relying on the Crime Survey for England & Wales…. The CSEW, as far as we’re concerned, is pretty much discredited as a means of measuring crime. And I think we all know that crime has risen significantly over the course of the last few years - and most of us, now, just don’t even bother to report crime”.

It’s unusual for a party leader to start a press conference calling out a journalist. But this QT politics (quote-tweet, not Question Time) where points are made by defining yourself against others, whose position you wilfully misrepresent.

I don’t think all is well. I think crime is a serious problem, surging in very visible areas like snatch theft and shoplifting. But this is a not a metaphor for crime in general: my case is to argue for perspective. We can’t in good faith talk about ‘lawless Britain’ if violent crime has actually halved since 2010. That’s according not just to the surveys but to hard NHS hospital admissions data.

I can see why the long-running, 35,000-household Crime Survey is problematic for Nigel Farage and anyone who wants to link crime to immigration. Here’s what it shows.

The idea of ‘Lawless Britain’ dissolves on contact with these figures, as Stephen Sackur demonstrated on Times Radio. Here he is with Reform’s Leila Cunningham, a newly-recruited councillor whom Farage has chosen as the face of his crime campaign.

Later on, she was faced with the same challenge on TalkTV and was armed with a response: to reject the whole CSEWs series as “not an accurate reflection of crime. In fact, more accurate is police-recorded data - and that’s what we base our campaign on.”

Police-recorded crime isn’t designed to be comparable year-on-year as they change the way crime is recorded all the time. Reforms like allowing crimes to be recorded by third parties) have changed the metrics. Recorded crime is not a National Statistic for this reason: it’s useful in showing police activity and localised problems. But it’s not designed as a source of long-term crime trends, in spite of Reform’s protestations to the contrary. This is widely understood (and explained in this ONS report).

But let’s take the Farage challenge at face value: could the 42-year Crime Survey be junk? Might crime be surging overall? To get to the bottom of this I consulted NHS hospital data. Every patient ‘episode’ is recorded and their problem categorised. The data is harder to pull (you need to spend ages querying the Hospital Episodes Statistics database) but the results are clear. And far harder for Farage to dismiss.

So the CSEW is corroborated by hard hospital data. Scholars at Cardiff University have been comparing the two for years and had this to say in their last report:-

Over the past two and a half decades that serious violence in England and Wales has decreased substantially. This message needs to be much better known, not least because it reflects better prevention and because fear of violence, often stoked by reports of rare tragic violent events, corrodes individual and community wellbeing.

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The visible rise in petty crime (and invisible fall of serious crime)

The Crime Survey lets us see the good and the bad in historical perspective. “We must and we will take back control of our streets,” says Farage. But have we really lost control? The theft figures, below, show most offences trending down with the striking exception of the visible ‘snatch theft.’

Bike thefts are now two-thirds lower than the 2008 peak. A viral video with 3.6m views claimed that bike crime was ‘legal’ in Britain used the Crime Survey figures to declare that there were ‘207,000 bikes stolen in 2023’. The message would have been ruined by adding perspective: it was 515,000 in 2010, falling to 183,000 last year. But you seldom see bikes being stolen, so it’s less noticable.

Shoplifting is noticeable. In 2014, the Tories categorised the theft of goods worth under £200 as ‘low-value shoplifting.’ Police deprioritised enforcement, with results as per below:-

Red tape is another problem. Arresting a shoplifter would, not so long ago, have kept a policeman off the beat for two or three hours. Now, paperwork means that’s the whole day gone. This is a major disincentive to go after small crime, with bad results.

This has led to the tagging of everyday items on the shelves and, in some neighbourhoods, the sight of people making off with stolen goods. If they feel it has been essentially decriminalised, the deterrent effect vanishes. My colleague Jenni Russell has also written about how fear that thieves may be on drugs and armed with knives makes security guards or ticket collectors less inclined to chase them for theft or (another visible crime) fare-dodging. Penalty fares in London are not at high levels, which reflects more enforcement failure than lack of crime.

Labour has pledged to reverse the Tory change and end what it calls “the shameful neglect of shoplifting over the last ten years.” But a year on, we’re still waiting. Which is pretty shameful in itself.

Sexual assault

The most controversial crime figures are for sexual assault which the new Crime Survey data shows to be slightly down but with no real trend over the last 20 years.

Reluctance to report such crime, from fear of the system, has been a notorious scandal that governments have been trying to address for years - closing the gap between actual and recorded crime. So recorded figures are up significantly as new procedures were introduced. The above and below graphs seem impossible to reconcile - and you can bet that the below one will be shared far more on social media.

Are women at a far-greater risk, as the above chart would suggest? It’s hard to enlist a third-party adjudication but one metric is UK and European surveys on whether people feel safe walking the street after dark. That number has been steadily rising, which is consistent with the idea of the streets becoming safer.

The above chart is another problem to those say that immigration is making women fearful. When a third-party snapshot poll showed 60pc of women feeling unsafe (a bigger number than shown by the larger surveys above) it was seized on as a “bombshell” figure by academic-turned-GB News host Matt Goodwin. “I’m just gonna say out loud what’s on a lot of people’s minds,” he said on a social media film. “A big reason is mass uncontrolled immigration”. But the more-robust European Social Survey suggests the relationship is inverse. We have far more immigrants on the streets but women feel significantly more safe, not less safe.

Perhaps the hardest crime figure of them all is murder.

This mirrors trends worldwide. The ubiquity of cameras and advances in forensics has pushed murders worldwide to the lowest level since recorded began and, probably, for centuries. As Marian Tupy writes over at Global Progress:-

Fourteenth-century Florence experienced the highest known annual homicide rate of 150 per 100,000 and estimated homicide rates in 16th-century Rome ranged from 30 to 80 per 100,000. Today, the intentional homicide rate in those countries [and the UK] stands at about 1 per 100,000.

Our crime picture is mixed, the shoplifting and snatch theft are a getting worse and giving a sense of overall crime surging. But the overall picture is one of progress - in some cases, astonishing progress.

Britain is not a crime-free land of milk and honey: we’re a country of rampant shoplifting and surging snatch theft. But we’re also a country where you’re less likely to be stabbed than any time in a generation: that’s according to hospital figures, not just crime surveys. When it comes to being attacked, our streets may even be safer than any time in history. But the digital world means a bubble can now bounce about a new ecosystem without ever encountering challenge or truth. And perhaps that’s what Farage is testing: if you can invent a scenario and campaign on it. While taking a swipe at those who enter the social-media domain with facts that jar with your message.

This is about politics, not criminology. In the end, Farage isn’t trying to measure crime; he’s trying to weaponise it. So yes, Britain has real crime problems – and some are getting worse. But to call it “lawless” is to abandon the data, ignore the trends and trade in fear over fact. A serious debate deserves better than that.