Northumberland and West Cumbria have the lowest crime rates in England. In Scotland it is Shetland (ZE2), in Wales it is Clarbeston Road and other places in Dyfed (SA63) and in Northern Ireland it is Craigavon (BT67) besides Enniskillen and Ballymena. That is according to a study for Royal Mail.
Royal Mail commissioned a study into characteristics of the UK through the lens of the postcode to mark the 40th anniversary of the allocation of postcodes to every town in Britain.
In 1959, the first postcodes were trialled in Norwich. Royal Mail started a major mechanism programme designed to use machines to overcome the problems of labour intensive letter sorting. This depended on reducing the address to a machine-readable code. In 1966, the eight-year programme to postcode the whole country began. This was completed in 1974 with the recoding of Norwich. Around 1.8 million postcodes are in use across the UK covering over 29 million addresses.
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The rural areas of the north of England are the top locations for people wanting the best chance of a crime free life. People living in the TD12 postcode sector in Coldstream, Northumberland, have the lowest rate of crime in England. This is based on the number of reported incidents violent crimes, burglaries, thefts and criminal damage incidents per 1,000 population. The West Cumbria postcodes of LA17 and CA20 have the second and third lowest crime rates. Also low are G74 and G75 for Glasgow, and Beaworthy in Devon; and EC2V in central London.
