A narrative that London is unsafe is now common currency across the wider UK
Key takeaways
- 61% of Britons think London is an unsafe place to live, only 30% see it as safe
- Only 34% of Londoners agree, with the majority (63%) saying the capital is safe
- In 2014, 53% of Britons had said London was safe, while 39% thought it was unsafe
- And just 15% of Londoners say their own local area is unsafe – similar to the number of people nationally who say their local area is unsafe (11%)
- 81% of Londoners say their local area is safe
- Reform UK voters are the most likely to thinking London is unsafe, with 85% saying so
New Reform UK London mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham is the latest in a line of politicians on the right – including US president Donald Trump – to brand the capital as an unsafe place to live.
Defenders of the city point to falling violent crime figures, although opponents dispute their accuracy, and analysts such as the FT’s John Burn Murdoch show that highly visible theft offenses have risen sharply in the capital along with other ‘disorder’ style crimes that have a greater impact on people’s feelings of safety than rare one-off serious crimes.
The results of a new YouGov survey that perceptions of the capital as being an unsafe place to live are widely held in Britain, with 61% saying they think London is unsafe, including 29% who deem it “very unsafe”.
Reform UK voters are the most likely to see the capital as a hazardous place to have a home, with fully 85% saying so, with the majority (58%) seeing it as “very” unsafe.
They are joined by 67% of Tories, 50% of Labour and Green voters, and 43% of Lib Dems in considering the capital unsafe.
However, there is one group of people who don’t see London as an unsafe place to live, and that’s Londoners themselves. More than six in ten (63%) say that the capital is in fact a safe place to inhabit, compared to 34% who feel the opposite way.
And indeed, fewer Londoners still consider their own local area to be unsafe, at 15% - largely in line with the wider population, of whom 11% feel they live in an unsafe area.
Back in 2014, Britons had generally considered London to be a safe city
The results show a total reversal in public opinion from a previous YouGov survey in 2014. That survey showed 53% of Britons considered London safe* compared to 39% who disagreed.
Among Londoners themselves in 2014, 75% branded the city safe while 21% considered it unsafe.
The 2014 survey asked about a list of 10 cities – if we recalculate the figures to exclude those who answered “don’t know” (which people were more likely to say about all the other cities listed, which would serve to apparently reduce their safe/unsafe figures compared to London if not accounted for), then London’s 58% ‘safe’ score was comparable to those of Manchester (58%), Liverpool (60%) and Leeds (60%). Topping the list by this measure was Edinburgh (83%), while Bradford (45%) and Birmingham (50%) performed notably more poorly.
With Reform UK voters currently most likely to think London is unsafe, our 2014 data likewise showed that those intending to vote UKIP were the most likely to say the same 12 years ago. At that time, those backing Nigel Farage’s previous party stood apart, with fewer than half considering the capital safe (41%) compared to 56-63% of their Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem contemporaries.
Indeed, this trend applied across all cities surveyed, with potential UKIP voters being more likely to brand any given conurbation as unsafe.
* please note that the prior survey asked if people thought the places shown were “safe” while our more recent survey asked if they are “a safe place to live”
See the full results here:
Do you consider London to be a safe or unsafe place to live?
Do you consider your own local area to be a safe or unsafe place to live?
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Photo: Getty
