England & Wales

It's not uncommon to see mainstream media reporting on the most dangerous areas of Britain. It makes for great headlines.

But often, that's all they are - just headline news. They often lump together statistics from a wide area, especially over a whole county, which can distort the real picture of how safe a county is.

That's why we've broken down the data even further than before. By using data supplied by the Home Office and police, we've been able to dig down deeper by providing crime data about much smaller areas - known as Lower Super Output Areas (LSOAs).

These LSOAs are built from groups of contiguous output areas that are designed to be fairly consistent, containing on average 1,500 people. Given that the average household size in England and Wales is 2.3 people, this means that we can break down data into neighbourhoods of around 500-700 houses.

This allows us to calculate almost neighbourhood-like statistics. For the purpose of crime reports, this is extremely useful for anyone interested in finding out more about a particular neighbourhood, especially those that are looking to buy a property or invest money into an area.

How did we calculate these scores?

First, we imported crime statistics into our database. These statistics, supplied by the Home Office, enable us to break down crimes committed for the last 12 months (December 2017 - November 2018). Although crimes are broken down into categories (antisocial behaviour, burglaries, robberies, vehicle crimes, violent crimes, shoplifting etc), we've added together the total number of crimes committed for each LSOA area for this date range.

Then, our algorithms calculate the instances of crime per thousand people that live in each LSOA. For example, LSOA area 'Bradford 039G' has a total of 1,372 people, and a total number of crimes adding up to 3,717. That's 2.71 crimes per thousand people.

Please note that we don't have data about Scotland or Northern Ireland, although we're looking at introducing it later this year.

LSOA areas by themselves are pretty meaningless to many of us, so we then tied up each LSOA to a postcode and a 'ward' (administrative divisions of a city or borough).

Now, some may ask whether we can tie each LSOA to a particular town, village or city, and rank them that way. But that's problematic, because a single town may have neighbourhoods that have extremely high crime rates, and neighbourhoods with an extremely low crime rates. That would distort the picture greatly, so we've decided not to do this. After all, the results would be as generic as you'd find in the mainstream media. So we decided to keep the rankings based on ward/LSOA for better accuracy.

Although crimes per thousand people is a useful statistic when it comes to investigating neighbourhood crime levels, we also tied in some extra data that provides readers with a more comprehensive overview of an area. We've also included the LSOA unemployment rates as well as deprivation scores, so that you can get a bigger picture about a neighbourhood.

Whilst high levels of deprivation and unemployment can play a part in the crime rates, it's not always a contributing factor. Some areas that have high deprivation scores may in fact have low crime rates. Bear this in mind as you're using the data.

The deprivation (IMD Score) ratings are based on statistics supplied by the Office for National Statistics, known as the "Indices of Deprivation". These are a set of relative measures of deprivation, based on income, employment, education, health/disability, crime, barriers to housing, and living environment deprivation. Our ratings take the overall relative measure of deprivation (Index of Multiple Deprivation).

Enjoy!

Chris Haycock
ZoomLocal Founder & Managing Director