Let’s go to the wall to stop graffiti
They say what gets measured gets managed, but no one is documenting the volume of graffiti blighting our streets and degrading civilised society.. until now, writes Neil O’Brien
I hate graffiti. I hate the way it makes places ugly and unsafe. I hate the middle class morons who think it is “creative” – but know they can escape from it to nice homes where they won’t have it sprayed on their front door. I hate the stupidity of it: the same stupid tags repeated again and again. I hate the public bodies and local councillors who commission graffiti murals to be down with the kids, and so make places less orderly.
Getting rid of graffiti would be my first step in recreating an orderly and civilised society
They say that what gets measured gets managed. But so far we aren’t even measuring the problem!
There is no good public data on how much graffiti there is in different places. Nor are there any good stats on how many people are punished for doing it. Graffiti offences are bundled up with other things in the published stats – the ministry of justice’s court-outcome data is broken down by offence category, such as “criminal damage under £5,000”.
As the broken windows theory goes, these visible signs of public disorder and lawbreaking create an environment in which serious crime becomes more likely, as well as making our lives, and the places we live, more miserable. We need to start doing something about it.
So I submitted Freedom of Information requests to every London council, asking for the number of recorded instances of graffiti and the number of Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued.
First, let’s look at recorded instances.
In 2025, London’s councils recorded just shy of 100,000 instances of graffiti between them, across the 30 out of 32 councils that provided me a figure. This is more like the amount of major instances or graffiti cleaned up than it is the total amount of new graffiti. But that’s still a lot every year!
Tagging Hackney
When it comes to graffiti, Hackney tops the leaderboard, with 13,613 recorded instances, followed by Kensington and Chelsea on 7,235, and Enfield on 6,149. At the other end of the scale, ten councils recorded fewer than a thousand instances across the whole year, with Redbridge on only 244.
It seems reasonable to assume that if a council has recorded an instance of graffiti, it has also cleaned it. So the 100,000 figure is therefore probably best read as a proxy for the number of instances cleaned, not the number of instances that actually occurred.
A more comparable statistic is the number of Fixed Penalty Notices (FPN) that councils have issued for graffiti offenders.
Remarkably, given the scale of graffiti recorded, there have been only 77 FPNs issued, with Southwark accounting for over half of these on its own, issuing 40.
Twenty-one councils issued none at all, not including Lambeth and Croydon who refused to provide a figure. Canada and Westminster both confirmed they do not issue FPNs for graffiti at all. And Camden and Greenwich issued one and two FPNs respectively, but generated no revenue from either, because neither were ever paid.
In total, London’s 77 FPNs generated just over £10,000 in revenue.
These are pretty measly figures when you consider the cost of the operation to clean up 100,000 graffiti sites a year.
Lee Kuan Yew’s great book “from third world to first” reveals the care he took to improve the public realm in Singapore – from greening the city to banning gum. He did this partly for its own sake, but partly because he knew it would make the city more attractive to businesses and mobile workers. We need to learn the lesson.
As the figures above show, there are currently almost no consequences for graffiti offences. Only 0.08 per cent of graffiti incidents ever receive a fine, and even then, it can be as little as £65.
For the majority of councils, there seems to be no attempt to punish the people who are doing this. In some cases, this is a matter of practice, in others, it seems to be a lack of enforcement capacity. Either way, councils need to do better at restoring consequences and a functioning deterrent.
Secondly, as well as improving the public environment, the swift removal of graffiti is a deterrent in its own right.
On the Conservative side, we have already announced changes to community sentences that would help make this possible. We would make unpaid work a universal requirement for all offenders, end the practice of serving community sentences from home, and strengthen penalties for those who fail to complete their sentence. The increased numbers of hours available would be directed at cleaning up litter, graffiti and grime in our town and city centres, as well as creating a visible deterrent.
The decline of our public spaces is not inevitable. Councils and central government already have the power to punish this – but clearly lack the will or resources to use it. It’s time we started treating these offences with the seriousness they deserve.
Neil O’Brien is MP for Harborough, Oadby & Wigston. This first appeared on his Substack