A new map showing ‘crime severity’ scores across England and Wales show where the crime hotspots are, with a tourist-favourite seaside town taking the top spot when it comes to crime
A new interactive map has revealed the areas most ravaged by crime across England and Wales, and it’s bad news for residents and visitors in one of the nation’s most popular seaside towns.
‘Crime severity’ scores measure the seriousness of wrongdoing in each area by examining the type of offending as well as the volume – meaning a murder or a rape counts much more heavily than a minor theft. The figures show that outside central London, where numbers are skewed by the sheer number of tourists being targeted by criminals, crime is at its most severe in Blackpool.
The seaside resort suffered the highest levels of violent crimes and sexual offences of any council area in the country, including central London. More than two-thirds of its overall severity score of 31.7 was made up by these types of serious crime.
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Middlesbrough was next with a score of 29.9, also mainly due to high levels of violence and sexual offending, and then Manchester (28.9), Birmingham (27.3), and Bradford (25.8). Including London, Westminster had the highest crime severity score (61.0), followed by Camden (32.4), but this was primarily due to the extremely high number of theft offences in both central London areas.
Check the crime severity score in your area using our interactive map below:
At the other end of the spectrum, Wiltshire was the safest place to live with the lowest crime severity score of just 6.0, followed by Wokingham (6.4), Ribble Valley in Lancashire (6.9), Waverley (6.9), and East Hampshire (7.1). Crime severity scores may offer a truer picture of the impact of crime in each area than crime rates, which are useful in measuring the volume of crime, but don’t distinguish between different types of offences.
They are influenced by the scale of punishment imposed on wrongdoers, so crimes causing a high degree of harm are assigned much higher scores than low-level offences, such as criminal damage. When crime severity scores were first introduced in the year ending March 2003, England and Wales was given an overall score of 15.9.
Scores then fell consistently down to a low of 9.3 in the year ending March 2013, but then began rising each year apart from a dip during the pandemic. They peaked at 16.4 in the year ending March 2023, and currently stand at 16.3.
Of police force areas, Cleveland Police in the North East has the highest crime severity score of 23.4, followed by West Yorkshire (22.4), West Midlands (22.3), Greater Manchester (20.7), and South Yorkshire (20.6). The Met, the nation’s busiest police force in terms of the number of crimes, scores lower at 20.4. Officers serving with North Yorkshire Police have the easiest beat, with a crime severity score of just 9.8.
