The 0.68 correlation between asylum dispersal and recorded crime published here is withdrawn

Correction, 12 October 2026. The crime rates in this piece came from a 25-authority file typed into this site’s source by hand in April 2026, with no raw file or script behind it, and they could not be traced to ONS tables. The correlation of 0.68 was computed from that file, so it is not supported by published data and should not be cited. The piece gave Blackpool 142.8 and Ribble Valley 32.4 crimes per 1,000. On ONS’s figures, police recorded crime excluding fraud in the year ending March 2026 was 146.5 per 1,000 residents in Blackpool and 38.5 in Ribble Valley (ONS, Crime in England and Wales: Police Force Area data tables, year ending March 2026, Table C2, on ONS mid-2025 population estimates). The correlation has not been recomputed. The headline originally read: “Higher asylum dispersal rates correlate with higher recorded crime, but deprivation is the common driver”. It now says what this page can support.

This analysis is withdrawn. It compared asylum dispersal with recorded crime across 25 areas, using crime figures that matched no published table. Recorded crime follows deprivation, urbanisation, policing and recording practice, and a two-variable correlation across a handful of areas could not have separated any of those from anything else, as the original piece itself said. This site does not publish an analysis linking asylum dispersal to crime.