Cheltenham sees more burglary, vehicle crime and damage per resident than 87% of UK towns

Per resident, against all UK towns; beside it, how it compares with towns its size.

Violence & sexual offences and criminal damage & arson sit below it.

“Violent” is police.uk’s violence and sexual offences (which includes harassment, stalking and assault without injury), robbery and possession of weapons. Anti-social behaviour isn’t a crime category; shoplifting and other theft happen mostly in shops and town centres rather than to residents, so neither counts in the grade.

September 2025 to August 2026, per 1,000 residents. The tick on each bar is the typical (median) town among UK towns and cities of 50,000 or more.

Safety letters rank against every UK town of 1,000 or more; the order here is context only.

Graded crime per 1,000 residents a year, September 2023 to August 2026, counting from the least: towns ranked near Cheltenham, and others in Gloucestershire.

A ward’s rate counts crimes where they happened, not where victims live, so College records 2.3× the violent crime per resident of the rest of Cheltenham. police.uk places each crime at an anonymous map point; some are named for the kind of place (a supermarket, a car park), and each row adds up every place of that kind in Cheltenham. We show only these, never streets or homes.

Crimes per 1,000 residents a year by council ward (the part of each ward inside Cheltenham’s built-up area), September 2023 to August 2026. Beside it, the public places police.uk named most often.

And about 7 burglaries, vehicle crimes or acts of criminal damage, plus 9 shoplifting and theft reports, in the 12 months to August 2026. Each dot is one resident; each coloured dot is one recorded crime.

No suspect was identified for 76% of Cheltenham’s burglaries, vehicle crimes and criminal damage, against 69% across UK towns, and for 17% of violent and sexual offences against 19%. Most violent cases close as “unable to prosecute” (64% here), usually because the victim doesn’t support a prosecution. About 7% of violent and 5% of household crimes reached court.

The latest outcome police.uk shows for each crime recorded in the first of the three years (September 2023 to August 2024), so most cases have closed. 6,173 crimes.

34% of residents live in the lowest-crime 30% of England’s neighbourhoods, and 28% in the highest-crime 20%. The crime domain scores the risk of violence, burglary, theft and criminal damage where people live, so it can read differently from the town-wide rate, which counts crimes where they happened.

Cheltenham’s residents by the crime decile of their neighbourhood (LSOA, about 1,500 people) in the English Indices of Deprivation 2025 (crime domain), where 1 is the highest-crime 10% of England’s neighbourhoods and 10 the lowest.

Casualties are counted where the collision happened, not where people lived: a main road through town adds through-traffic, and residents’ own risk on roads elsewhere isn’t here. Seriously injured uses the Department for Transport’s adjusted figures, which even out the police forces’ different ways of recording injuries. There’s no national rate here: more than half of road deaths in England and Wales (58%) happen outside every town’s built-up area. Source: DfT road casualty statistics (STATS19), 2021–2025.

Collisions police recorded inside Cheltenham’s built-up area, 2021–2025. Described here; not part of the Safety Grade.

Cheltenham records more graded crime per resident than every neighbour in the table. Prestbury, 2.2 miles away, records 10.9 violent and sexual offences per 1,000 residents a year (3-year average), against Cheltenham’s 35.2.

Per 1,000 residents a year, the same three years. Tap a town for its safety page.