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Crime & Safety

Graphic idea: dual-line graph — foreign-born population rising while property crime falls. Replace with your finished graphic.

The full picture

On crime generally

A continuous reduction in property crimes in England and Wales since 2002 corresponded with a rising foreign-born population — but there is no evidence to suggest that rising migration caused this decline, nor any evidence it caused crime to rise. Research on areas with high East European (A8) migration after 2004 found a one percentage point increase in the A8 share of the local population was associated with a 0.4% fall in property crime.

A small association was found between asylum seeker concentration and property crime in some studies, but since asylum seekers were only around 0.1% of the population, any macro effects were negligible.

On grooming gangs

The grooming gang scandal involved appalling crimes and serious failures by authorities — that is not in dispute. What is disputed is the far-right claim that the data proves a specific ethnic group is uniquely responsible.

Baroness Casey's June 2025 National Audit confirmed that "the ethnicity of perpetrators is shied away from and is still not recorded for two-thirds of perpetrators, so we are unable to provide any accurate assessment from the nationally collected data." The Home Secretary agreed with that conclusion.

Graphic idea: "What the data actually says" card — the two-thirds-unrecorded fact from the Casey Audit. Replace with your finished graphic.

A subsequent police analysis released in December 2025 showed that "self-defined ethnicity" was only recorded for 34% of both suspected perpetrators and victims of child sexual abuse in 2024. Casey herself said the failure to record ethnicity was "only helping the bad people" — meaning the honest position is that the data is incomplete, not that it proves far-right claims.

Graphic idea: 'Most child abuse happens at home — by someone the child knows' card.

What the data actually shows. Group-based exploitation by "grooming gangs" is rare compared with the scale of all child sexual abuse. The overwhelming majority of abused children are harmed by someone they know — a family member, friend or acquaintance — not by strangers or organised gangs. The Crime Survey for England and Wales found that most childhood sexual abuse is committed by someone known to the victim, and the NSPCC confirms that the vast majority of children who experience contact sexual abuse were abused by someone they knew. Where offenders are identified, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) found that most are young, white men, reflecting the wider population — though most perpetrators are never identified at all. The honest conclusion is not that grooming gangs don't exist or that authorities didn't fail victims — they did — but that framing child abuse as the problem of one ethnic or religious group ignores where most abuse actually happens and leaves more children at risk.