Relationship between neighbourhood crime and health
About 2 mins
Key points
- On average, neighbourhoods with lower crime rates tend to have higher life expectancy.
- The average crime rate in places with the least crime (the lowest crime decile areas) is 3.3 crimes per hundred people. This compares with 26.8 crimes per hundred people for the places with the most crime.
The relationship between an area’s health and crime levels is complex. On one hand, living in areas with high levels of crime can affect people's health negatively. In addition to the direct health effects of being the victim of violent crime, fear of crime can also have an indirect detrimental impact on health. Research shows that fear of crime results in people exercising less, as well as reducing how often people socialise, resulting in poorer mental and physical health.
At the same time, people living in high crime areas are more likely to be in poor health. Crime rates are higher in more deprived areas, and deprivation is itself strongly associated with poor health.
This chart shows the relationship between people’s health – as measured by life expectancy – and the crime rates in the neighbourhoods where they live.
- Neighbourhoods with lower crime rates tend to have higher life expectancy.
- Men’s life expectancy in neighbourhoods with the lowest crime rates is 82.2 years, compared with 76.6 years in neighbourhoods with the highest.
- Women’s life expectancy in neighbourhoods with the lowest crime is 85.6 years, compared with 81.5 in neighbourhoods with the highest.
- Crime rates are 3.3 crimes per hundred people in the tenth of neighbourhoods with the lowest crime rates, compared with 26.8 crimes per hundred in the tenth of neighbourhoods with the highest.
Levels of crime are just one of many neighbourhood-specific characteristics that affect health. Availability and affordability of healthy food, access to green space and air pollution are some of the others. As with levels of crime, the relationship between these factors and health is affected by wider, higher-level neighbourhood factors such as income levels, housing and education. Some of these can be captured by the composite measure of deprivation.
- Neighbourhoods are defined as Middle layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs), based on 2011 Census areas. MSOAs are geographical areas that comprise 2,000–6,000 households (5,000–15,000 people).
- The analysis is restricted to MSOAs in England only, due to the availability of life expectancy data at this geographical level.
- Life expectancy is defined as the number of years a person of a specific age in a specific area in a specific time period can be expected to live, if mortality rates for that area and time period remain constant. Life expectancy for MSOAs is calculated for a period of five consecutive years, due to the small population numbers in those areas and in order to reduce the effect that seasonal events (such as flu) might have on the number of people dying.
- Crime rates represent the number of street-level crimes committed in an area as a percentage of the area’s resident population. They have been calculated for each MSOA for the whole calendar year. Note that Greater Manchester has been excluded from the analysis as they have not provided 2024 data.
Source: Health Foundation analysis of Police UK, street-level crime data, England, 2024; Office for National Statistics, Life Expectancy at Birth for Middle layer Super Output Areas (MSOAs), England, 2016–20; Office for National Statistics, Mid-Year Population Estimates for Middle layer Super Output Areas, UK, 2020
