An eagle-eyed customer of ours noticed something was adrift with Hampshire Constabulary’s ASB monthly totals from April 2018 – basically, they appear to be several times lower than before. I got in touch directly with Hampshire and they agreed. As soon as the revisions are posted to data.police.uk – we can go back and revise.

It’s a good example of why it’s important to make crime data open – because mistakes happen and errors are more likely to be seen and corrected when the data is visible.

Here at UKCrimeStats, each month we don’t just update monthly crime data, but also property prices and corporate and commercial ownership data of property. Every few months, when the data is available, we update postcodes and boundaries. Less often than that, we would update energy, broadband data. We anticipate bringing road accident data forward shortly.

You can track our updates on this page.

In the meantime, we are always looking to do something new – so by popular request, we are bringing in crime heatmaps to work across every shape – constituency, ward, postcode sector etc. so you can just see at a glance where the distribution of reported geolocated crime is and is not in a known area.

So where are the worst and best broadband spots across the whole country?

Using our new feature https://ukcrimestats.com/Broadband/ you can find out. I’m always amazed how many people buy or move into any new place without having a serious idea of how good the broadband and mobile connectivity data is. And I would include myself in that category. But this should help you.

We have matched the official broadband connectivity data released by Ofcom by postcode to the postcode centroids (a latitude/longitude fix for each of the 1.6 million postcodes) to every geospatial shape, population by postcode census figure and households by postcode figure to give you new insights into the unfortunately, still rather large broadband not-spots across the country. You can also rank results and export all of them to excel for further analysis.

Some caveats;

1. the number of households (data we’ve inserted – approx 28 million) is not the same as the number of premises (homes + buildings not lived in – approx 30 million). However, the superfast contracts – bringing fibre to the cabinet – actually didn’t include business parks/premises (poor decision, that one imho). Some of those left-behind buldings have since pursued their own solutions which are off Ofcom’s radar. And most have not.
2. Residential populations have changed a bit since the 2011 census, mostly upwards. Precise figures available with the next census in 2021.
3. Ofcom’s data is from mid-2018. Granted, there has been quite a lot of progress since then. Depending on whom you believe, UK full fibre coverage extends between 7% and 3% across the whole country. BT’s own Openreach “fibre” checker nevertheless now refers to the same Ofcom data. And there is some debate about whether the 7% includes premises passed, premises connected and premises actually buying full fibre to the premises products. Even then, some of it – thinking of KCOM in Hull – seems to offer full fibre products at copper speeds.
4. Postcode unit shapes do not fit nicely inside any other geospatial shape like constituency, ward etc. – if only! They overlap. So this is an approximation, but a good one because the middle of a postcode, the centroid is applied consistently across all 1.6 million. So in the round, it’s accurateish.
5. We are working on the data on Scotland – coming very soon, equally Northern Ireland.
6. This is not a caveat, if you want serious accuracy for all – government really should release the full postcode address file (i.e. 1 acme road, town, postcode x 28 million), the uprn (individual premises building number with a lat/long) for every building and the full postcode unit shape, all free of charge. At the moment, only big business can afford to pay the fees to government financed/protected monopolies for these (Ordnance Survey/Post Office). That’s actually a disgrace because it tilts the barriers to entry against start-ups and small businesses who will drive our future innovatiuon and growth from zero to 1. I used to push this argument a lot with my former colleagues at the Institute of Directors. Understandably, bright as many people are in the policy world, not many have the data brains to get to grips with it, unless they work with data. I’m very hopeful that the new Boris government will see the light and unleash creative spirits by taking this extremely high yielding – and – cheap step forward. Open data has lost its way, it’s time to re-invigorate the cause.

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So I decided to do my first video, now on youtube.com so you can see how it works. The bigger the radius and the number of crimes in the area, the longer it takes to load – so please bear that in mind. Apart from that I hope it’s fairly self-explanatory. As always, any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Crime for April 2019, Property prices for April 2019, Corporate Ownership data and latest postcodes. Always plenty to do here to keep this website up to date for all our users.

We have crime data going back to December 2010 and populations can change quite quickly. We now have a full set of annual official estimates for the small area Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) and Middle Super Output Areas (MSOAs). The very latest available year is 2017, we expect to see 2018 in the Autumn. Population is essential to calculating crime rates or crime rates per hectare (a unique UKCrimeStats feature) to deflate/inflate the impact of crime relative to the size of the resident population.

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All done. Kent Police however is still far behind on catching up with missing data. Officially, the changelog says that they are only missing ASB data from November 2018 due to a change in IT systems.
But it seems to go much deeper than that. In a typical month, Kent
would report 20k crime and ASB incidents but the data from November to
February is only showing 3k and 6k crimes which can’t be explained by a
missing 2-3k ASB incidents. I shall take it up with them directly.

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