Home/Our work/UK Crime Statistics
Case study · Data platform · Live since 2011
A defensible answer to “how safe is this location?”
A subscription platform that turns published police data into a weighted, population-adjusted safety score for every neighbourhood in England and Wales — built for people who have to justify the answer, not just know it.
The problem
Crime data is published. Answers are not.
Police forces in England and Wales publish street-level crime data every month, and it is free to anybody. It is also close to unusable in its raw form: counts with no denominator, categories that shift, geographies that do not line up with anything a normal person recognises, and no way to tell whether the number you are looking at is high or low.
Meanwhile a specific group of people need exactly this and need it defensibly. A safeguarding lead assessing risk around a school. An estates manager answering for forty sites. An employer with a duty of care to staff working late. They are not curious — they have to evidence a decision, sometimes to an inspector or a court.
Raw counts cannot do that. A count tells you a busy city centre has more crime than a hamlet, which everybody already knew.
At a glance
- Type
- Subscription SaaS platform
- Sector
- Safeguarding, estates, public sector
- Coverage
- England and Wales
- Data cycle
- Monthly, automated
- Status
- Live, and operated by us
Fifteen years in service
Rebuilt on modern .NET without ever going dark
The platform has been live since 2011. Everything else on this page matters less than that sentence, because a decade and a half is long enough for every shortcut to come due.
The data outlived several versions of the software
Police data formats changed, geographies were redrawn, categories were renamed and retired. A platform that ingests somebody else's monthly publication has to absorb all of that without asking its customers to care, and without losing the ability to compare this month against a decade ago.
Rebuilt, not patched
The current codebase is a full rebuild on .NET 10 — separate domain, data access, services, functions and web projects, with six test suites across unit, integration and end-to-end. It replaced the original while the original kept serving subscribers, which is a harder problem than either building or rewriting on its own.
Still actively developed
Not maintained in the sense of left alone. New report types, a portfolio product for multi-site organisations, revised national comparison methodology — all shipped into a platform whose oldest subscribers predate most of it.
What we built
From published files to a number you can stand behind
Automated monthly ingestion
Police data publishes on its own schedule and is revised without announcement. The pipeline runs unattended, detects what has changed, validates before it commits, and leaves an audit trail — so when a score moves, we can say exactly why.
A geography that makes comparison fair
Every location resolves through our own postcode toolkit to its LSOA, local authority, region, population and deprivation decile. That is what allows a neighbourhood to be compared against genuinely similar areas rather than against the national average, and it is the difference between a statistic and an assessment.
Weighted scoring, per audience
A safeguarding lead and a warehouse manager do not care about the same offences. Report types weight the crime categories that matter to their reader — violence, drugs and weapons for safeguarding; theft and criminal damage for premises — over a consistent national benchmark.
Published methodology
Sources, weightings and benchmarks are set out openly, and where an area cannot honestly be compared the platform says so rather than inventing a figure. Customers who must show their reasoning cannot use a black box.
One site, or an entire estate
Free postcode search for anyone; specialist reports for a single decision; and for organisations answering for many locations, a portfolio view that ranks the whole estate on one live grid with board-ready reporting and a downloadable pack.
Running itself
Twenty scheduled jobs nobody has to remember
A platform serving thousands of subscribers on a monthly data cycle cannot depend on somebody being at a keyboard. Almost everything that happens on a schedule happens without us.
Durable by design
Report generation runs as a durable orchestration rather than a long web request, so an order placed at the moment of a deployment or a transient failure still completes. Customers should never find out which minute they happened to click in.
How it is built
An application we still run
It went live in 2011 and it stayed our responsibility — subscriptions to honour, a data cycle to meet and an uptime obligation every month since.
Built on our own geography toolkit
The fair-comparison guarantee depends entirely on resolving a postcode to its census geography and population. We maintain that layer ourselves rather than renting it, which is why it can be relied on month after month. More about GeoCode
Similar problem?
Public data, made to answer a real question.
If you have a dataset that ought to be telling you something and is not, this is exactly the kind of work we take on.
info@meddalwedd.co.uk