A teenage crime wave is sounding alarm bells across England

I was talking in the pub the other night to Gill, a good friend from the West Yorkshire market town of Ossett (population 21,000), who with her husband Glyn has a much-loved second home in rural Brittany. The couple had just come back on the ferry after a month at home, and Gill was not the bearer of good news. 

Ossett, she says, is in crisis. It’s not just the shortage of good, well-paying jobs, or the lamentable state of the regional NHS, or the housing shortage, or inflation, or the condition of local schools – all of which weigh heavily on the local community. It is the fact that gangs of young people, some not yet into their teens, have gone feral, roaming the streets after school, intimidating women and the elderly while thieving anything they want from supermarkets and convenience stores. 

According to Gill, a primary school teacher in the town for more than 20 years, she and her husband daren’t visit town centre pubs or eat out once the light begins to fade. “If we want to call in on friends just a fifteen-minute walk away, we have to take a taxi. It wouldn’t be safe otherwise.” 

So what are the police doing about it? Nothing, she says. They have apparently advised older people to stay indoors in the evening and told staff in shops that are subject to shoplifting on an industrial scale to avoid confrontation with the youngsters responsible. 

If Gill is to be believed, you are more likely to encounter a 13-year-old boy with a knife in his hand than an officer on the beat. 

But was she exaggerating? First, I looked up Ossett in Wikipedia. Situated west of Wakefield, it is an ancient wool town, mentioned in the Domesday Book, that owed its prosperity during the Industrial Revolution to coal mining and textiles but which, since the 1980s, has been in genteel decline. No surprise there. Next, I consulted the official 2022 crime report for the borough, compiled by CrimeRate.co.uk. This is what I found: 

“Ossett is among the top 20 most dangerous small towns in West Yorkshire, and is the 49th most dangerous overall out of West Yorkshire’s 118 towns, villages, and cities. The overall crime rate in Ossett in 2022 was 88 crimes per 1,000 people. This compares favourably to West Yorkshire’s overall crime rate, coming in 31% lower than the West Yorkshire rate of 126 per 1,000 residents. For England, Wales, and Northern Ireland as a whole, Ossett is the 196th most dangerous small town, and the 1,118th most dangerous location out of all towns, cities, and villages.” 

So far, so bad. But not the worst. However, the report went on to record that Ossett had since become the worst small town in the region for “other” crime, including vehicle theft and shoplifting. Overall, the most common offences involved violence and sexual assault, with 952 such crimes recorded in 2022, up 13 per cent on the previous year. 

According to Gill – an ardent Labour supporter – Ossett’s current troubles have their origins in the Thatcher years, when the mines closed, manufacturing virtually ceased and social services went into a tailspin. First the Blair years, then thirteen years of Tory rule, under five prime ministers, finished the job, she says, so that boys and girls entering their teens no long show any respect either to their elders or to the system. 

She didn’t have to go on (though she did). What came across loud and clear was that working-class parents are too busy these day trying the make ends meet, leaving their children to “own” the streets and, with no money in their pockets, to lift anything they fancy from shops knowing there is no-one to stop them. 

Turning to CrimeRate again, I looked up the stats for crimes investigated in July of this year, the most recent month for which figures are available. Of the 20 serious crimes the police looked into (and remember, many crimes go unreported in the belief that the police are a waste of time), not one was resolved. Either no suspect was identified or, for reasons that are not disclosed, officers were “unable to prosecute”.  

Some of the trends are said to be easing off, making Ossett “safer,” including anti-social behaviour, bicycle theft, criminal damage and arson. Others, involving drugs, possession of weapons, public order, shoplifting, robbery and mugging are “getting worse”. Violence and sexual assault are among the crimes getting worse fastest. Last year, 41 offences for every thousand residents in this category were reported in Ossett, up from 31 per thousand in 2019. 

Is it any wonder that Gill and Glyn feel a weight rolling off their shoulders when they drive off the ferry at St Malo or Roscoff? Their stone cottage in Brittany, overlooked by a magnificent beech tree hundreds of years old, is – as used to be said in England – “safe as houses”. The only recent crime of which they are aware in their neighbourhood was committed by hornets, who made a nest in their outhouse over the summer and were removed without charge after being reported to the local mairie. 

Most worrying of all is the fact that Ossett is not alone in facing a crime wave in which a majority of the culprits are of school age. The opening sentence of the CrimeRate report states, if you recall, that Ossett is only “the 49th most dangerous overall out of West Yorkshire’s 118 towns, villages, and cities.” And West Yorkshire is home to less than 2 per cent of Britain’s population. 

To provide context, Croydon, where a 15-year-old schoolgirl was stabbed to death this week, is officially 1.6 per cent “safer” than Ossett. Leeds, by contrast, is 97 per cent “more dangerous”.

It is also worth noting that Marseille, France’s second city, has one of the highest crime rates in the western world and that crime generally in France is on the rise, especially in its larger towns and cities. In this respect at least, the UK is far from isolated. 

Full disclosure: I did not bother to call West Yorkshire Police for comment on this article. For what would be the point? They would say that they are over-stretched, short-handed and under-funded but that they investigate every crime that is reported to them in the hope of bring those responsible to justice. They might even claim that they are doing a better job than the numbers would suggest. And I have no doubt they would mean what they say. Meanwhile, if Gill and Glyn want to visit their friends three streets away in Ossett, they wait until the taxi driver outside toots his horn. 

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