Last week the London mayor boasted that the capital now had the lowest murder rate on record, reports Kumail Jaffer, Local Democracy Reporter

Mayor's Question Time on Thursday, 15th January — Mayor’s Question Time on Thursday, 15th January

Mayor of London Sir Sadiq Khan has rejected accusations of “cherry picking” specific crime statistics to “pretend” overall levels of serious offences have come down in the capital.

Conservative London Assembly member Neil Garratt used the first Mayor’s Question Time session of the year to take aim at Khan for “gaslighting” Londoners by suggesting the city is safer than it ever has been.

Last week the mayor hit out at his political opponents for “talking down” London as new data showed murder rates in London fell to their lowest level since 2014. However, Garratt directly confronted Khan over the perception that things were “getting better” for ordinary Londoners.

“You are cherry picking statistics and you’re trying to pretend that things are getting better,” he told the mayor.

“Let’s look at robbery – if you break down the knife crime stats and specifically focus on robbery – let’s be clear what this means, an innocent person going about their day being confronted by a violent man threatening them with a knife to hand over their valuables.

“More people in London were threatened with a knife, robbed at knifepoint for their valuables, than the last year of Boris Johnson. The figures have got worse. Every single year of your mayoralty is worse than what you inherited. How can you tell Londoners that it’s getting better?

“It’s very clear that he has spent this week and this morning gaslighting Londoners about what they see with their own eyes.”

Met Police stats on knife crime from 2015 onwards

Earlier this week Garratt published data showing that knife crime offences had risen from 9,721 in 2015/16 – the last year of Boris Johnson’s time in office – to 16,147 last year.

For knife crime associated with robbery, the number climbed from 4,494 to 10,017 in 2024/25.

Khan responded by saying the population had risen by over a million since he took office in 2016, while reduced funding under the previous Conservative government resulted in cuts to police numbers.

“I was the person making it quite clear about the consequences of this austerity,” he added.

“So crime did go high in a number of areas, including homicide. What we’ve done is, from City Hall, try to fill that massive hole left by central government by more than doubling investment in the police, at the same time as setting up the country’s Violence Reduction Unit.”

Admitting there was “still more to do in other areas”, such as high-volume crime like theft, he said using homicide as a comparison measure was “obvious” as it is an “objective way” of measuring progress when it comes to recording violent crime.

On Monday 12th, Khan hailed new figures from the Met Police which showed there were just 97 homicides in London in 2025, down from 109 in 2024 and the fewest since 2014.

The mayor noted that London’s homicide rate now stands at 1.1 per 100,000 people – lower than any other UK city as well as New York (2.8), Berlin (3.2), Milan (1.6) and Toronto (1.6).

In the same period of time, violent incidents resulting in injury fell by a fifth, while firearms discharges are less than half what they were seven years ago.

He said: “Many people have been trying to talk London down, but the evidence tells a very different story. Last year London had the lowest murder rate per capita since records began, the fewest murders of those aged under 25 this century, and one of the lowest number of homicides for almost three decades.

“It’s clear that our sustained focus on being both tough on crime and tough on the complex causes of crime is working.”

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