People talk about “crime in Lancashire” as if it were one thing. It is not. I took the official recorded-crime figures for all fourteen of the county’s districts and put them in order, and the spread is enormous: the worst-hit town has four times the crime rate of the safest. What that league table really shows is not a county out of control, but a county split in two, and the line it splits along is poverty.
The league table
Every district, ranked by total recorded crime per 1,000 residents, year ending December 2025. The bar shows how each compares; the figure in brackets is the violence rate. The England average is 83.5 per 1,000.
It is a map of deprivation
Look at who is at the top and who is at the bottom, and the pattern is impossible to miss.
The five districts above the England line are Blackpool, Burnley, Preston, Hyndburn and Blackburn with Darwen. Those are also, almost exactly, the five most deprived places in the county. Blackpool is the most deprived district in England; Burnley is fourth. At the other end sit Ribble Valley, West Lancashire, Fylde, South Ribble and Chorley, the most comfortable parts of the county, where crime is a third to a quarter of Blackpool’s rate.
This is not a coincidence and it is not about the character of the people who live in these towns. Deprivation and crime travel together, everywhere, for the same reasons: where there is poverty, worklessness, addiction and hopelessness, there is more crime, and the people who suffer it most are the poorest residents of the poorest towns. The crime map of Lancashire is, almost line for line, its poverty map.
What the county average hides
Here is the part that should change how this is talked about. On the headline number, Lancashire is not a high-crime county at all, its force-area rate of 79.4 per 1,000 is slightly below the England average of 83.5. A minister or a chief constable can stand up and say, truthfully, that Lancashire is about average.
But that average is meaningless to the people who actually live with crime, because it blends Blackpool and Burnley together with Ribble Valley and Fylde and calls the result “Lancashire.” It is like saying a man with his head in the oven and his feet in the freezer is, on average, comfortable. The one figure where the county does sit clearly above England is the one that matters most: violence, where Lancashire runs at 34.5 per 1,000 against England’s 31.3.
What I want done
- Resource to the need, not the average. Police and prevention money should follow the crime, which means the hardest-hit towns, Blackpool, Burnley, Preston, Hyndburn, Blackburn, get the lion’s share, not an equal slice that ignores a four-to-one gap.
- Treat crime as a symptom. The lasting way to bring the top of this table down is to attack what drives it: deprivation, worklessness and addiction in the towns that were hollowed out and left behind. Enforcement alone never fixes a poverty problem.
- Publish the divide. This league table should be public and updated every year, so residents can see exactly where their town stands and hold someone to account for it, rather than hiding behind a flattering county average.
I represent part of one of the towns at the top of this table, so I will not pretend the average tells the truth. Lancashire is two counties wearing one name. The people in the half that gets the crime deserve to have that said plainly, and acted on.
Where these numbers come from
You do not need this part to follow the story. It is here so the working can be checked.
- All crime rates are from the Office for National Statistics, Crime in England and Wales: Police Force Area data tables, Table C4 (recorded crime per 1,000 population by Community Safety Partnership area), year ending December 2025, published April 2026. Each Community Safety Partnership maps to one local authority district. Figures exclude fraud and are per 1,000 residents.
- The England average (83.5) and Lancashire force average (79.4 total, 34.5 violence) are from the same release, Table P3.
- Deprivation rankings (Blackpool 1st, Burnley 4th most deprived district in England) are from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s English Indices of Deprivation 2025.
- The “violence” figures in brackets are violence against the person per 1,000, the same ONS table.
One honest note. Recorded crime depends partly on how much crime is reported and recorded, which can vary between areas, so small differences in the middle of the table should not be over-read. The big picture, a four-to-one gap that lines up with deprivation, is far too large to be an artefact of recording.