Is Farage’s promise to halve crime remotely plausible?

Nigel Farage claims that he has a plan to “cut crime in half, take back control of our streets, [and] take back control of our courts and prisons”.

- SEAN O'GRADY

The Reform leader says that “we are facing nothing short of societal collapse”, wants to build emergency “Nightingale prisons” on Ministry of Defence land, and has semi-promised to send convicted murderer Ian Huntley to El Salvador (admittedly a bit of a vote winner).

It’s an ambitious package, but there are questions about its viability...

Is Britain facing societal collapse?

No. If it was, you wouldn’t get back alive from the pub or be able to get petrol or bread.

Is crime up?

On some measures and in some places, against certain given periods of time, it is up; on other measures, it’s down.

The variations in the way crime is measured are one issue - it’s risky to go by the number of crimes recorded by the police, because people will sometimes not bother to report them, especially the less serious matters, so statisticians treat these figures with caution.

The other way of measuring crime rates, which should also be adjusted for changes in population, is by conducting surveys among the public – but not everything is included. Somewhat confusingly, Farage seems to think that the survey data is unreliable because people have given up telling the police about, for example, thefts that might affect their insurance. That doesn’t make sense.