How The Safety Of Rwanda's Capital Compares To London

Deputy foreign secretary Andrew Mitchell claims that Kigali is arguably’ safer than London, writes Colin Drury. But is it?

- Colin Drury

The government has finally won its parliamentary battle to send asylum seekers to Rwanda – with Rishi Sunak promising to have the first flights in the air within 12 weeks.

In passing the new law, ministers ignored a ruling by the Supreme Court that Rwanda is not a safe country, and have decided that, in fact, it is. And according to Andrew Mitchell, the deputy foreign secretary, not only is it safe, but Kigali, the Rwandan capital, is safer than London.

“It is absolutely extraordinary what the Rwandan government has achieved in all walks of life,” said Mr Mitchell. “It is a safe country. And indeed, if you look at the statistics, Kigali is arguably safer than London.”

Is that true? Here, we look at the evidence...

Crime rates

It can certainly be argued that London is more dangerous now than when the Conservatives took power in 2010. Cuts to police and council budgets over the last decade and a half have correlated with a surge in crime, not just in the capital but across much of the UK. Some 887,870 criminal offences were reported to the Met Police in 2021-22, up more than 140,000 on the figure for 2015-16.

Violent crime, sexual crime, knife crime and drug crime have all gone up during the same time span, and, while there is some evidence that this trend has now peaked, numbers are still far above those recorded in the middle of the last decade.

Still, Kigali is very far from crime-free. While direct comparisons are hard, we know that the homicide rate for Rwanda as a whole was 3.59 per 100,000 people in 2020, according to the World Bank. That’s more than double London’s rate of 1.5 per 100,000 population, and three times the rate of the UK as a whole.