City Hall has released with a fanfare Metropolitan Police Service statistics that tell a good news story for London and its Mayor. Following years of often lurid claims by some of his political opponents that Sir Sadiq Khan has presided over a collapse of law and order in the capital, he is now able to point out that in 2025 there were fewer homicides in London, 97 in total, than in any year since 2014, while at the same time the city’s population has grown.
Writing in the Guardian, he has hailed London reaching “the lowest per capita homicide rate in its recorded history”. Referring by name to Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, two of the more persistent pushers of the “lawless London” narrative, he argues that such people could not be more wrong because “the evidence is clear, in London we’re winning the battle against violent crime”.
The Met figures aren’t only about homicides. They also say violent offences resulting in injury in 2025 were 5.1 per cent lower than in 2024, and that “hospital admissions of young people for knife assault fell by 43%” in the period from 2019, the year the Mayor set up his Violence Reduction Unit.
Its role is to help facilitate projects at local level designed to prevent young people becoming involved with violence and criminal gangs. Speaking to the BBC, the VRU’s director, Lib Peck, noted the striking fall in the number of young homicide victims over time. In 2025, were 18 of them below the age of 25 compared to 69 in 2017.
The Met also claims increased success with “cracking organised crime gangs” including closing so-called county lines drug supply operations, mostly to areas outside London, and with confiscating firearms and knives. This, it says, explains why “NHS data shows the number of people hospitalised after being stabbed or attacked with a sharp weapon has fallen by 29% in London in the past five years, from 1,350 to 955”.
Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley praised the VRU and his officers, saying that taking “precise action” relentlessly against the most dangerous gangs and offenders, helped by new technology such as Live Facial Recognition, had helped him honour his pledge to reduce crime.
WHY THE NOISE ABOUT THESE NUMBERS? WHY NOW?
The 2025 figures have been released against the backdrop of an unceasing torrent of media and politician claims that London is a perilous place to live or work in or to visit, and that Mayor Khan is to blame.
Such attacks come from the far-Right in all its forms, ranging from the authoritarian populist wing of the Conservative party, personified by such as Robert Jenrick and former mayoral candidate Susan Hall, to the most extreme social media propagandists, some them overtly ethnonationalist and racist. Khan, remember, is the Muslim son of immigrants from Pakistan.
Such negative accounts of London feed a wider crime-and-decline story which, in its most sinister manifestations, argues that the city has “fallen” due to a takeover by criminal immigrants and calls for the forceful restoration of a “lost” golden age.
A City Hall and Met fightback against depictions of London as “lawless” has been underway for a while, and this is the biggest public pushback yet. They will surely be pleased that almost every Big Media platform has picked up the story.
There have been efforts behind the scenes as well, reflecting concerns that the global ubiquity of the attacks on London is damaging its reputation internationally. I am reliably informed that journalists working for overseas media have been receiving briefings from the Met.
Meanwhile, London and Partners, the organisation that works with City Hall and others to “promote London across the world“, has recently warned its members about “a damaging perception among some of our international audiences that crime in London is rising” and the need to combat it.
As well as highlighting Met stats that tell a different story, it warned of “a deliberate campaign of disinformation on social media to promote false, negative narratives about London”. Rowley and the Met have also been making much of London’s homicide rate being lower than those of many other global cities, not least several in the US.
REFORM UK CLAIMS ABOUT “KNIFE CRIME”
A negative narrative about London crime has long been a centrepiece of campaigning by Reform UK, which hopes to make significant gains in the London borough election on 7 May.
Last summer, the party’s leader, Nigel Farage, claimed that “London is in a state of collapse” and that “crime is out of control” in the city. Unveiled last week by her leader as Reform’s mayoral candidate for May 2028 (and as it’s London “head”), Westminster councillor Laila Cunningham, who was elected as a Conservative in 2022, spoke of “masked gangs roaming our streets”.
At a Reform rally in London on Saturday, party chairman David Bull said “knife crime is up 67 per cent since Sadiq Khan became Mayor in 2016”. By the time Cunningham came to the podium an hour later things had apparently got worse – “knife crime” was up by 68 per cent, according to her.
The Met figures released today do not refer to “knife crime” as a category, though a “knife-enabled crime” section of the Met’s crime dashboard provides monthly statistics for offences meeting its definition of “knife crime” that go back to the financial year 2015/16 (the tables for November 2025, at the top of the list, contain them all)
“Knife crime” is not a specific criminal offence and can be used in different ways by different people and organisations. The Met uses it to cover recorded offences where knives are used to injure or to threaten victims, including when no knife is actually seen by the victim. Such offences include robbery, which last year accounted for nearly 60 per cent of them, and domestic abuse.
The Met’s crime dashboard shows that in May 2016, the year Khan secured the first of his three mayoral election victories, it recorded 906 offences that it categorised as forms of “knife crime” and in Nov 2025, the most recent month shown, it recorded 1,124 such offences in total. That’s 218 more than in May 2016, representing a 24 per cent difference, not 67 or 68 per cent.
Broken down, the May 2016 data shows that of the 906 “knife crime” total, 376 of the recorded offences resulted in the victim being injured. The November 2025 data show 254 “knife crime” injuries – about two-thirds of the number recorded during the month Khan was first elected.
The higher total “knife crime” figure is due to the greater number of offences when a knife was used to threaten the victim and seen by him or her but not used to injure (439 in May 2016, 603 in November 2025) and the higher number of cases when no knife was seen (94 in May 2016, 260 in November 2025).
In between those two monthly periods, the figures have both risen and fallen, with the largest total figure being 1,383 (January 2022) and the smallest, 669 (January 2021). The injury figures by month have ranged from 406 (in August 2023) to 212 (January 2021).
They do not appear to bear out suggestions that “knife crime” has been on a consistent upward path since Khan’s arrival in City Hall – certainly not on the scale claimed by Reform – over a period when the population of Greater London has increased by about 800,000 to around nine million.
DO THE NEW STATS TELL THE WHOLE STORY?
Of course they don’t. Other Met figures show that London has not escaped the national increase in shoplifting and confirm that theft from the person, notably the theft of phones, has gone up a lot in the past five years (On London looked into these upward trends last February). There has been an increase in reported sexual offences against women.
At the same time, there are the usual important caveats about police crime statistics to keep in mind. The Met only records the crimes it witnesses or that Londoners tell it about. There are undoubtedly lots of crimes that go unreported.
Nigel Farage argues – as Boris Johnson did when first seeking election as Mayor in 2008 – that this quantity is huge and reflects Londoners’ belief that there’s no point in telling the Met that they’ve been victims of crime because nothing will be done about it.
Interestingly, Farage has repeatedly rubbished the other primary source of crime data, the Crime Survey of England and Wales. Statisticians tend to regard this as the best available measure of long-term trends in such as violence, theft and fraud precisely because it picks up offences that haven’t been reported to the police. Yet at last week’s Reform press conference Farage dismissed the survey as:
“The old-fashioned way of doing it, where you put a letter through a letterbox and people fill it in and sent it back by post. People my age and older do that sort of thing, the vast majority of the population just chuck it in the bin.”
Farage said this meant the Crime Survey of England and Wales [is] “completely out of date” and doesn’t work. In fact, the survey is compiled for the government from face to face interviews with members of households selected to represent the population as a whole. Summarising its findings, the Office for National Statistics says they show that, with some notable exceptions such as sexual assault, “crime against individuals and households has generally decreased over the last 10 years”. Perhaps that explains why Farage wants to discredit it. At the press conference, he went on to say:
“If you actually look at police crime statistics you will see not only a massive expansion in crime of all kinds. What you’ll also not get is the mass under-reporting of crime.”
Where London is concerned, the Met stats just released plainly contradict Farage’s assertion about “a massive expansion in crime of all kinds”. At the same time, he flatly dismissed the different set of crime stats whose specific value is picking up crime that isn’t reported to the police. As this article goes live, Farage has yet to respond to the new Met figures.
The other thing to keep in mind about fluctuations in crime rates is that they may also be related to factors the police can influence and others that they, at least initially, cannot.
For example, if the police encourage more people to come forward when they have been victims of certain types of offence there might, indeed, be an increase in reports of such offending. It doesn’t necessarily follow that more such offending is actually taking place.
Also, increases in some types of offending can occur because criminals discover new areas of opportunity or because competition in some criminal markets intensifies, resulting in greater violence (the drug market is a good example).
On top of all that is the complicated question of how much difference policing makes to crime levels when various other things also influence them, such as the preventative work of London’s Violence Reduction Unit, which Sir Mark Rowley has made a point of praising.
As for blaming the Mayor, it is important to recognise, as much media reporting does not, that Sir Sadiq Khan, like his two predecessors as Mayor, does not actually run the Met on a day to day basis. Neither does the home secretary. The Met Commissioner is accountable to both of those politicians, but the Met is run by Met.
WHAT DO LONDONERS THINK?
YouGov has revealed a very striking difference between how Londoners and non-Londoners view London’s safety. A new poll by the company has found that nearly two-thirds of Londoners – 63 per cent – consider their city to be either “fairly safe” (48 per cent) or “very safe” (15 per cent) compared to only 34 per cent who think it “very unsafe” (13 per cent) or “fairly unsafe” (21 per cent).
People in the rest of the south of England, the Midlands, the North, Scotland and Wales felt pretty much the opposite. Unsurprisingly, at a national level, Reform voters held the most negative views: an extraordinary 58 per cent regard the capital as “very unsafe” and a further 27 per cent think it “fairly unsafe”. Conservatives were the second most likely to think London unsafe.
Given that different recent survey outcomes have put support for Reform in London at only 19 per cent, it might be said that Farage and Cunningham’s depiction of London as being “in a state of collapse” and its streets crawling with “masked gangs” shows them to be out of touch with majority London opinion.
On the other hand, it could be argued that even if portraying the capital as “lawless” ultimately hinders Reform in the capital more than it helps it, monstering “Sadiq Khan’s London” as a symbol of all that Nigel Farage most dislikes has, so far, paid dividends elsewhere in the UK.
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