Sam Boyd, Co-founder, Common Ground Justice Project
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“Covenants, without the sword, are but words”, wrote Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan. Or, as Melissa, a sales manager from Great Yarmouth, put it to me in a recent focus group on the topic of shoplifting: “If there's no consequences … why is everybody paying for their shopping?”.
At the Common Ground Justice Project, in our conversations about crime with voters and victims across the country, we hear this frustration repeatedly. In short: why should I keep playing by the rules when so many others don’t seem to bother? “Rules Are For Suckers in Two-Tier Britain”, is how one columnist put it, rather more bluntly. Rightly or wrongly, many seem to agree: our recent research found fewer than 1 in 5 Britons think people who commit crimes face consequences at least ‘most of the time’.
This perception of widespread ‘consequence-free crime’ not only corrodes trust in the police and justice system. It also deepens mistrust of our politics and government, and weakens the social contract binding us together. As Hobbes argued, a stable society depends on compliance with shared norms, backed up by the expectation that breaking them will be punished. But, as our latest report shows, that expectation appears to have frayed.
Some might reasonably contest the public’s perceptions of crime, pointing to statistics showing a remarkable 78 per cent drop in overall crime (excluding fraud) since 1995, and arguing, as Fraser Nelson has, that we’re safer than we’ve ever been. Others may highlight the role of social media misinformation, or fearmongering narratives of lawlessness peddled by bad-faith actors.
These arguments are not without merit. Violent crime, in particular, has fallen sharply, social media has been shown to increase fear of crime, while Britain, compared to Haiti, for example, is clearly not ‘lawless’. London has not ‘fallen’.
However, this is not the whole picture. In many cases the public are simply believing their own eyes: in almost every focus group we’ve held this year, people described seeing thieves walking out of their local shop, goods in hand, in broad daylight. Their stories are backed up by data: while headline crime has indeed fallen in recent decades, this masks a sharp rise in many of the most visible, so-called ‘low-level’ or ‘minor’ crimes, such as shoplifting, which hit a record high in 2025 (causing harm on local shopworkers and communities that is far from ‘minor’). Fraud also reached new heights this year.
More broadly, our research found a full 4 in 10 Britons report being ‘significantly affected’ by a crime in the past three years. Meanwhile, according to the Home Office’s latest crime outcomes figures, only 7 per cent of crimes with a victim result in a charge or summons. So at least on these measures, the public are right: most crime does lack consequence.
In any case, while we can argue over statistics, how people feel – whether they feel safe, and whether they feel they live in a society with repercussions for wrongdoing – also matters in a democratic society, especially when trust in our politics, institutions and the rule of law is so low. If people continue to feel ignored and patronised, many will be drawn further towards the darker politics of division. And as recent history shows, simply telling people they’re wrong while pointing to a graph is unlikely to win them back. People need to feel heard.
A recent More in Common poll for the UK Extremism and Democratic Resilience Centre showed 61 per cent of Britons believe the social contract is broken, while fewer than one in four (23 per cent) think it is working. More alarmingly, it found that one in seven adults, and one in four under-35s, now consider political violence acceptable in at least some situations. Voters are losing faith in our political system’s capacity to address their problems and are becoming more open to extreme solutions.
None of this is to say that resources should be diverted from less visible, higher-harm crimes, nor that punishment must only mean prison. As our research shows, Britons largely understand that much prolific offending is driven by drugs and addiction, and they support responses that treat the causes. Above all, however, people want to see clear consequences and real accountability for causing harm; ‘punishment with a purpose’, as one swing voter in our Pendle and Clitheroe group put it. Hobbes’s sword may not be the right tool, but the government could do worse than making sure ‘petty’ crime doesn’t pay.