How safe is the UK?

It’s easy to look at the news headlines and worry. News, by its very nature, always features the most shocking incidents and ignores everyday occurrences. It makes it difficult to know what a place is really like, especially if you are not living there.

Certainly, you’ll read some bad things in the UK news. It can make the country seem like a dangerous place. But is this the truth? The reality may surprise you, because it’s actually one of the safest places in the developed world on one major metric.

The data we’re using is from a report of 41 countries by the OECD as part of its Better Life Index 2023. The OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and this annual survey is a good benchmark because the selected countries are more likely to have processes that record and analyse their data. However nothing is perfect. The OECD uses police-recorded crimes for its statistics, but it’s really difficult to make a direct comparison. For example, there are differences in how countries categorise and record, plus you have to consider the likelihood of victims contacting the police in the first place. For these reasons, data about a lot of crime is pretty meaningless. Even homicide, which is pretty straightforward and frequently reported, can have differences – for example, are deaths by drunk driving included or not?

Anyhow, on to that surprising news…. There are fewer deaths by homicide in the UK than in any other OECD country. Yep, you read that correctly. Shocking headlines in British newspapers about knives and guns disguise the fact there are fewer than 0.2 homicides per 100,000 in the UK (less than 2 per million), placing it at the bottom of the scale of all the 41 OECD member countries surveyed.

To compare, in Norway it was three times higher 0.6 per 100,000, in Australia it was 0.9, in the USA 6.0, in South Africa 13.7 and in Mexico (the top of the chart) it was 26.8. Other countries with low homicide rates are Japan and Luxembourg (also 0.2).

One of the other metrics that the OECD measures in its Safety report is ‘feeling safe walking alone at night’. This is an interesting one as it ignores police data and instead asks people directly, providing an insight into how people feel about their neighbourhood and the likelihood of becoming a victim of crime.

Looking at safety this way, the data for the UK isn’t quite as good. Just over three-quarters (78.36%) of people say they feel safe walking home alone at night. That result is in the centre of chart, a very similar position to the USA (78.07%), Canada (77.5%), the Czech Republic (77.43%). and Japan (76.75%). The places people feel least safe are South Africa (39.98%) and Chile (40.69%), while a large majority feels safe in Norway (93.16%), Slovenia (90.56%) and Finland (87.55%).

So in summary: you’re extremely unlikely to be murdered in the UK, but be careful at night when you are heading home and in some areas maybe get the bus or a taxi instead.

Image: Peter Hall/Unsplash