If your entire political worldview is built on stoking fear, you really don’t want the public to notice when the facts move in the opposite direction. Which is why the latest crime figures are being quietly ignored, talked around, or drowned out by the usual algorithmic din from Reform UK cheerleaders and their bot-assisted outriders.
Here’s the inconvenient reality.
The number of homicides recorded in England and Wales has fallen to its lowest level in more than 40 years.
According to the Office for National Statistics, police recorded 499 homicides in the year to September 2025, a 7% fall on the previous 12 months. The last time the figure was lower was 1983, when 482 homicides were recorded. This is not a marginal change. This is a historic low.
And no, this isn’t statistical trickery. Homicide includes murder, manslaughter and offences such as allowing the death of a child. These are the most serious crimes we measure and they are going down.
Knife crime: down, not “out of control”
The most politically abused statistic of all is knife crime. It’s routinely weaponised by Reform-adjacent accounts to paint a picture of a country in collapse. Yet the ONS reports that the fall in homicide has been largely driven by a 23% reduction in killings involving knives and other sharp instruments.
There were 174 knife-related deaths during the period.
That matters, because it directly contradicts the claim that Britain is descending into some Mad Max-style bloodbath. It also aligns with other data: overall knife crime offences fell by 9%, to 50,430, and firearms offences also fell by 9%, to 4,851.
This is not a blip confined to quiet rural areas. The ONS explicitly notes that knife crime fell across most police forces, including Greater Manchester, the Metropolitan Police area and the West Midlands, precisely the places the fear-merchants obsess over.
Even NHS data backs this up, showing a continued decline in hospital admissions for assaults involving sharp objects. When police data, health data and national statistics all point in the same direction, denial starts to look ideological rather than analytical.
London: another awkward truth
London is often presented as Exhibit A in the “Britain is broken” narrative. Yet the Metropolitan Police recorded 97 homicides in 2025, down 11% from 109 in 2024. That is the lowest figure since 2014.
Again, these are not Reform talking points. These are hard numbers.
The real problem doesn’t fit the panic script
None of this means everything is fine. The ONS report makes clear that shoplifting rose by 5%, from 492,660 to 519,381 offences, while robbery remained broadly flat at 82,354.
These are crimes that affect daily life, particularly for retail workers and small businesses. They don’t fit neatly into the authoritarian fantasy of mass violence and social collapse — but they do require serious, targeted policing and social policy.
As Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood acknowledged, while progress has been made on violent crime, “the crimes that tear at the fabric of communities, like shop theft and shop robbery, continue to rise and we must do more”.
That response includes 13,000 more neighbourhood officers, £2 billion in additional funding, and the most significant policing reforms in decades — including structural changes and new national capabilities to tackle terrorism and fraud.
Why the bots stay quiet
Reform-aligned accounts thrive on rage, not reality. Falling homicide rates, declining knife crime and reduced gun offences are bad for engagement. They undermine the argument that Britain needs a lurch towards strongman politics, mass surveillance without accountability, or culture-war policing.
So instead you get anecdotes, viral videos, and relentless amplification of the worst individual cases, stripped of context and inflated into proof of national collapse.
The truth is simpler and far less useful to them: violent crime is falling, and it has been for some time.
That doesn’t mean complacency. It means honesty. And honesty is precisely what the Reform bots would rather you never see.
