Newsletter #50: Epping legal decision shuts Bell migrant hotel

PLUS: Some clarifications on our article 'The collapse of Bournemouth'

Good afternoon.

Nigel Forrester is away this week, so I will be filling in for him. This week has certainly been a quiet one. Today, we discuss Epping, Ukraine, Posh George, and Ukraine. (As for the announcement of Reform’s ‘mass deportations’ plan, more on that in a couple of days.) But first: Bournemouth.

This newsletter’s agenda: Some clarifications on our article ‘The collapse of Bournemouth’ (free); Epping legal decision shuts Bell migrant hotel (paid); Reform UK Board Election (paid); George Cottrell responds to anonymous allegations (paid); Peace in Ukraine? (paid).

Some clarifications on our article ‘The collapse of Bournemouth’

I am glad that many readers enjoyed my article about Bournemouth, published last week. It was a popular article and, as a result, has attracted plenty of criticism as well as praise. Some of these critics have made half-hearted attempts at ‘debunking’ the claims I made about crime in the town, often by reference to less rigorous datasets than I used to collate my statistics.

For full transparency, in order to aid those who had neither the time, or, as it seems in the case of my critics, the ability to navigate and filter a spreadsheet, I will enunciate my methodology here.

The underlying data is drawn from the government’s quarterly collation of recorded crime figures from each Police Force, broken down in turn by their constituent Community Safety Partnerships, the latter of which are (in the dataset, but no longer in practical terms) coterminous with local authority boundaries as they were at the beginning of the time series in 2002, according to the geographic reference tables which accompany the data. This is useful as the former district of Bournemouth, which neatly covered the town, was merged with the Christchurch and Poole districts in 2019 to form a new local authority. The total crime figures for each financial year for the former district of Bournemouth are then divided by the population total for Bournemouth in the year the financial period ends, either the census estimate or the ONS’s mid-year estimate, which for years after 2019 is calculated by summing the populations of the wards on the new local authority which cover the same area as the old Bournemouth district (this method could only be applied up to 2022, when the ONS ceased publishing at ward level; the 2022 total is carried forward to 2025, and so will likely be a marginal underestimate, though the wards also cover a handful more streets than the old local authority, so the imperfections probably cancel out). The resulting data points are then multiplied by 100,000 to give a legible per capita figure. The same methodology is applied to the Metropolitan Police’s numbers for comparison to London.

Many of the ripostes to the statistics link a site called crimerate.co.uk, which includes some interesting analysis and visualisations but uses a less robust method. Crucially, the website merges Bournemouth with Poole, which has a much lower crime rate than Bournemouth (using the government’s data), and thus brings down significantly the overall quoted rate; the website asserts a rate of 66 per 1,000, whereas the government’s data, which I have used, reveals that the rate is 95 per 1,000 for Bournemouth alone, a difference of 44%. Given the very substantial difference in the area measured (Poole is nearly the same size as Bournemouth), the crimerate.co.uk data, while user-friendly for the area it covers, is therefore useless for an analysis of Bournemouth alone. It is ironic that I have been accused of being unfamiliar with the town by people who failed to notice that the explicit methodology on crimerate.co.uk, which helpfully includes a map showing the area covered, clearly incorporates Poole in the area it calls ‘Bournemouth’.

It is not just the methodology which has been criticised. I have some other points I feel I should respond to. Other critics have asserted that Bournemouth is one of Britain’s safest urban areas, relying (I assume) on listicles from online newspapers or something of that sort. This is partially true, in that overall crime rates are still lower in Bournemouth than in many larger settlements, but my point about crime in the town is that it is much higher than it used to be, which is the objective conclusion to be drawn from the reported figures.

Bournemouth’s crime rates are indeed higher than the national England and Wales rates. In 2024/2025 the overall crime rate was 12.4% higher than the national rate, rising to a 27.5% differential for rape offences, and 9.8% higher for violent offences (these statistics are derived using the same methodology as above). Again, part of my point is that Bournemouth is following a national trend of increased criminality.

Some have pointed out that recorded crime in Bournemouth is down over the past couple of years; I actually indicated as much in my article, but to respond to that it seems there was a recording ‘lag’ produced by the pandemic: offences are recorded in the period they were reported, not when they occurred, and thus there is a dip in 2020/2021 followed by a peak in 2021/2022 which has plateaued since. Nonetheless, crime in Bournemouth in the post-pandemic era remains much higher than it was before 2019.

—Anonymous Contributor, Pimlico Journal

Epping legal decision shuts Bell migrant hotel

Of the most practical significance this week was the decision by the county court in Epping to (effectively) shut down the controversial Bell Hotel, which has been the source of many local concerns and protests. For those not in the know, the Bell Hotel in Epping was one of the many hotels in Britain being used to house illegal immigrants, at significant — and currently murky — cost to the British taxpayer. The Bell Hotel became a flashpoint after an illegal immigrant staying in this hotel was charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. Protests have been frequent since then, and just before the hotel was shut Robert Jenrick himself paid the area a visit. (Friend of Pimlico Journal Jack Hadfield has also been doing some excellent work documenting these protests.)