Has crime risen since the Wethersfield asylum centre opened?

The Wethersfield accommodation centre, on a former RAF base in rural Essex, took its first asylum seekers on 12 July 2023. Whether it has brought crime with it is asked locally often enough that it deserved a real answer rather than an impression.

So we pulled the police data. Not a headline, not a press release — the raw street-level records, month by month, for three years.

Short answer: no. Crime near the site rose sharply, peaked in late 2024, and has since fallen below where it started. Braintree town has fallen every single year.

The longer answer is more interesting, and it comes with caveats we want to put up front rather than bury.

What we measured

Three things, every month from August 2023 to July 2026:

• Within one mile of the site. A radius query around the base itself.
• Within one mile of Braintree town centre. Residents at the centre are given a free bus into Braintree each week, so if there were an effect that did not show up at a rural airbase, this is where it would appear.
• The whole Braintree constituency, as a benchmark.

Everything is indexed so the three can be compared despite wildly different sizes: the site area averages six crimes a month, the town around 240.

What it shows

Table: Crimes Weekly · GB-WE-02 · Source: police.uk street-level recorded crime, 1-mile radius queries and Braintree constituency, Aug 2023 – Jul 2026

Crime within a mile of the site did rise — on a rolling twelve-month basis it peaked about 43% above the first year, around the end of 2024. It then fell steeply through 2025 and now sits roughly 16% below where it began.

Braintree town never rose at all. It fell in year one, again in year two, and again in year three. Shoplifting there is down 57% over the period and vehicle crime down 48%.

Both places fell further than the constituency as a whole.

The caveats, which matter more than usual here

The numbers near the site are tiny. An average of six recorded crimes a month, ranging from zero to seventeen. At that scale ordinary random variation produces swings that look dramatic in percentage terms. The 43% peak represents about twenty extra crimes spread across a year. We are showing it because hiding it would be dishonest, not because it proves anything.

There is no proper "before". The centre opened on 12 July 2023, and police.uk only publishes a rolling 36 months — which today begins in August 2023. Our earliest data point is three weeks after it opened. We have assumed the first months are close to a baseline, on the grounds that the centre started with a small number of residents and filled up gradually, but that is an assumption and you should know we have made it.

It is also a shaky one at the edges: August 2023 records zero crimes within a mile of the site and September records one, before it settles at seven to ten a month. Those two near-empty months drag the baseline down and make the subsequent rise look larger than it is.

A proper analysis needs years of pre-2023 data. That exists — police.uk publishes a bulk archive going back to December 2013 — and it is the next thing we will do.

The data cannot tell you who did anything. This is the big one. Street-level police records give you a category, a month, and an approximate location. They contain no nationality, no immigration status, and no indication of whether an offender or a victim was connected to the centre at all.

Violent crime makes up 58% of recorded offences near the site, against 44% across the constituency. That sounds significant until you remember that a large number of people living in congregate accommodation will generate recorded offences regardless of who they are — and that a good share of those offences may have been committed against residents rather than by them. Nothing in this dataset separates the two, and anyone telling you otherwise from this data is guessing.

Recorded crime is not crime. It is what was reported and logged. More policing attention on an area produces more recorded crime without a single extra offence being committed. Wethersfield has had a great deal of policing attention, including protests.

Why we are publishing a result we did not expect

We went looking for a number and found one that does not support the version of this story most people arrive with. It also does not support the opposite version: crime near the site genuinely did rise for a while, and pretending otherwise would be the same failure in the other direction.

What the data supports is narrower and duller than either: crime near the Wethersfield site rose, then fell, and is now lower than when the centre opened. The town people are bussed to has fallen steadily throughout. Neither place did worse than the surrounding area.

If that changes — and we will keep checking — we will publish that too.

Figures: police.uk street-level recorded crime, one-mile radius queries around grid references for the site and Braintree town centre, plus the Braintree constituency boundary, August 2023 to July 2026. The underlying monthly counts are published here so anyone can check the arithmetic.

Crimes Weekly is an independent programme. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or speaking for any police force.