London ‘most dangerous city’

A Gallup survey revealed that London is the most dangerous capital and that Great Britain had the highest burglary rates of the 21 countries studied.

London was singled out as the Europe’s most dangerous city with one in three residents experiencing a crime in 2004, the year analysed in the European Crime and Safety Survey by Gallup for the UN Criminal Justice Research Institute.

The Home Office rejected the Gallup findings and said that they failed to reflect the 55 per cent fall in burglary since 1997 identified by the British Crime Survey.

Tony McNulty, the Police Minister, said: “The survey is three years out of date and we have concerns about its quality and the comparisons.”

The research was based on telephone polling of 2,000 people in each country, as a valuable comparison of relative crime rates across Europe that found burglary decreasing everywhere apart from Britain and Finland.

The Gallup survey put domestic burglary in England and Wales at 3.5 per cent of households, a rise on 2.7 per cent in 2000 and ahead of all other countries. The European average was 1.7 per cent, with Ireland fourth at 2.3 per cent and Sweden experiencing the least burglary with 0.7 per cent.

“Using an identical methodology, the UK came out with the highest rates of burglaries,” a spokesman said.

While crime rates are falling in Britain from a peak in 1995, they are not going down as fast as in other EU countries, the spokesman added.

In a survey of cities, 32 per cent of Londoners said they had been victims of crime in the year surveyed — more than in Amsterdam (27 per cent), Belfast and Dublin (both 26 per cent), Copenhagen (24 per cent) and Stockholm (23 per cent)

The safest cities for residents were Lisbon (ten per cent experiencing a crime) and Budapest and Athens (both 13 per cent).

London was more dangerous than New York (23 per cent) and Istanbul (18 per cent).