You may be aware that I recently sort the nomination to contest in next year’s London mayoral contest. I took a particular interest in the worrying crime situation, and will now show you some of the context that me and my team studied carefully during our campaign. Future-proofing the capital will requires us to understand in granular detail what is really happening. As you will see below - Westminster in particular has some challenges…
The capital city of England is a distinct environment in many ways. It is the largest city in the United Kingdom, with an area of 607 square miles and a population of 8.796 million people, many of which live in the most densely populated areas in the country.
The population is also the most diverse across a range of characteristics. According to the 2021 Census, 36.8 percent of the population in London identified as ‘White: English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish or British’, compared with 81.7 percent of England and Wales as a whole; 25.3 percent identified with a religion other than Christianity. London had the lowest proportion of disabled people (15.7 percent) compared with 17.9 percent in England and Wales. Despite having contributed £503 billion to the UK’s GDP in 2019, the capital city also features some of the starkest divisions in wealth. Trust for London notes that those in the top wealth decile “hold 44.3% of London’s total net wealth” whilst those in the bottom decile hold none. This can be observed in boroughs such as Lambeth and Southwark, where areas of relative affluence intertwine with areas of abject poverty.
Prevalence of Crime
It is necessary to depend upon a number of data points to understand both the prevalence of and trends in crime in the capital city, including absolute volume of crime, crime rate per 1,000 residents, and crime severity score (CSS).
Figure 26: Overview of the volume of crime, crime rate, and crime severity score in the top 20 London boroughs most affected by crime. Source: Metropolitan Police Service, Police.uk, Crimerate.co.uk, & Office for National Statistics..
Volume of Crime
In terms of absolute crime volume, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) recorded 834,394 total notifiable offences (TNOs) for 2021/22, compared with the 6,060,065 offences for England and Wales. When MPS figures for Borough Operational Command Units (BOCUs), there is one obvious outlier.
Westminster had a significantly higher amount of crimes recorded in the year 2021/22. This is a 68 percent increase from Newham, the borough with the second highest amount of crimes recorded. Excluding the City of London for which statistics are skewed for reasons we will return to later, Westminster also has the highest crime rate in London, at 219 per 1,000 residents. The vast majority of these crimes were theft and violence offences, comprising 47 and 19 percent of TNOs recorded in the borough respectively. There is little publicly available information to explain the apparently abnormal prevalence of crime in this borough. This paucity of literature is a problem in itself. What is available, however, suggests that the borough’s large night-time economy, combined with its status as a tourism hotspot as well as high numbers of commuters may be the primary criminogenic factors responsible for its crime level.
For example, a 2006 examining bag theft within licensed premises, indicated that contemporaneous drive towards 24-hour cities presented a significant risk factor for acquisitive crime. However, without a detailed understanding of the drivers of crime specific to the borough, proposing any kind of meaningful solution is a challenge. The College of Policing notes that research to date suggests visible patrols to be an effective method of reducing overall levels of crime. Whilst ‘more bobbies on the beat’ is an oft-presumed panacea for reducing crime, in this specific case it may prove an effective solution for two key reasons:
Firstly, it can be observed that in 2019/10, theft offences recorded by the MPS in Westminster reached a ten-year high. During the pandemic lockdown, this figure fell from 44,341 to 12,627 offences. However, in the year since, numbers have begun to climb again. This interruption to trends in criminal activity provides a unique opportunity for the MPS to reassert its presence in criminal activity hotspots across Westminster and buck the spiralling trend of increases in property crime.
This would have the additional effect of increasing public confidence which has slumped to an all time low. Secondly, in its report ‘The police response to burglary, robbery and other acquisitive crime’, HMICFRS notes that just 4 percent of thefts result in a charge. Addressing this situation is key to winning back the confidence of members of the public. Part of this issue lies in the current system for classifying crime. Theft is defined as a ‘volume’ or ‘low-level crime’ but, as identified by a 2023 report by thinktank More in Common, “for the victims of these crimes, the impact is anything but low level”. HMICFRS attributed this inability to respond to serious acquisitive crime to forces lacking capacity “at all stages, from call management to eventual closure of a crime”. The influx of 8,812 officers driven by the Police Uplift Programme (as of 31/10/2022) presents the MPS with a chance to reassess how they assign and deploy resources; if the force is currently ill equipped to secure a higher charge rate, they should instead focus on the prevention of thefts through proven methods, which include visible patrols.
Whilst heightened patrols may serve as a suitable vehicle for investment in prevention, theft is often a symptom of more deeply rooted social challenges, including substance misuse.
The Government released its ‘Beating crime plan’ in 2021, which stated that 45 percent of thefts (excluding fraud) are committed by people who are addicted to substances. It therefore follows that any attempt to address high levels of theft should also seek to understand and deal with substance misuse. The Government has committed to changing its approach to addiction in its ‘From harm to hope’ plan, an initiative which has seen welcome boosts in funding for local authorities in an effort to rebuild the drug treatment system. According to a guidance document released in April 2022, such funding allocations will be made via the Department of Health and Social Care. Local authorities experiencing proportionally more severe rates of harm can be designated as enhanced funding areas (EFA) on the basis of four factors: rate of drug deaths, deprivation, opiate and crack cocaine prevalence, and crime. Westminster was not one of these areas. This is in spite of the fact that for the majority of these metrics, the borough is one of the worst affected in London.
In 2021, Westminster had the ninth highest rate of drug deaths amongst all London boroughs; nearly double those in Lambeth and Southwark, and more than twice those in Newham. Whilst not the most deprived borough in the capital, Westminster is far from the least, having scored the 20th highest of all London boroughs for income deprivation in the 2019 indices of Multiple Deprivation. Furthermore, according to Trust for London, 36 percent of people in Westminster live in households below average income (HBAI), placing it joint second with Brent and Newham for the highest proportion of people living in poverty.
Data produced by the then Public Health England showed that, in 2016/17, Westminster had an almost identical level of opiate and crack cocaine users to Camden (2,142 and 2,147 respectively). Finally, figures from the House of Commons Library showed that Westminster had the highest drug crime rate of all boroughs across the capital, with 3,221 offences committed in 2020/21, which is consistent with MPS figures demonstrating it has the highest absolute number of crimes across London.
This leaves Westminster with significantly less additional funding for its drug strategy when compared with boroughs experiencing similar challenges such as Camden. Taking into consideration the funding allocation for 2022/23 and the indicative funding allocation for 2023/24, the borough is set to receive £2.3 million less than the latter over the next two years, an outcome which does not reflect the current situation.
Crime Rate
The overall crime rate for London, at 95 per 1,000 residents, is higher than that of the United Kingdom (75.88 per 1,000 people), England (83.77 per 1,000 people), and Wales (81.97 per 1,000 people). Across the 33 boroughs of the capital city, crime rate ranges from 60 crimes per 1,000 residents in Richmond-upon-Thames to 819* in the City of London However, due to the use of the residential population as a denominator in this calculation, this figure is skewed by the small number of people living in this area (c8,600). The fact that the square mile sees roughly 513,000 commuters daily may be a contributory factor to this rate of victimisation. On the other hand, the absolute volume of crimes instead of crime rate, the City of London appears to be the safest of all the boroughs. City of London Police data indicates that there were 8,975 crimes in this area between February 2022 and February 2023. The next highest rate of crime in London is in Westminster at 219 per 1,000 residents, as referenced earlier in the report.
Figure 29: Highest crime rates per 1,000 residents in London.boroughs. Source: Crimerate.co.uk.
*Based on a figure of 7,961 crimes in a 12 month period as provided by crimerate.co.uk.
Crime Severity Score
The Office for National Statistics has released a database illustrating the crime severity score across regions, police force areas, and community safety partnerships (which in most cases equate to local authorities). These statistics aim to provide insight into which areas are affected by more serious crimes. The ONS notes that such statistics are experimental, and are therefore “published in order to involve users and stakeholders in their development, and as a means to build in quality at an early stage”. However, the insight provided by such a dataset can support a deeper understanding of crime in addition to existing metrics such as volume of crime and crime rate per 1,000 residents.
Figure 30: London Boroughs with the highest crime severity score compared with London overall. Source: Office for National Statistics.
As with both the absolute volume of crime and the crime rate per 1,000 residents, Westminster is an outlier with a crime severity score of 37.0. This is significantly higher than both the overall score for the capital city (17.4) and the individual score of any other London borough. This is driven, in part, by the sheer scale of crimes committed in Westminster in comparison to other boroughs, a factor which feeds into crime severity scores.