00:00That picture of London has fallen does not match the reality.
00:04London still tops the list of the best global cities in lots of different studies,
00:09but it's definitely fallen in terms of people's perceptions.
00:14About 12% of Londoners were the victim of a crime in the year up to September 2025.
00:20But the average guess among the public across the UK as a whole is that 30%,
00:26so three in 10 of Londoners were the victim of a crime.
00:31So a big, big overestimate.
00:32There's very different perceptions of London depending on your political background,
00:36where reform voters are much more likely to think London is dangerous and going downhill
00:42than, say, Labour, Lib Dem and Green supporters.
00:46We're getting more divided in our perception of London.
00:51And everyone is definitely entitled to their own opinions about London,
00:55but we've got to keep a common view of the facts of London.
00:59That's really important if we're going to have a proper debate about what London is,
01:03what it does and what its future is.
01:06We've got, as humans, a negativity bias where we will pay more attention to negative information.
01:13And obviously media, social media know that.
01:15So we get fed more of that sort of information.
01:18We're also more likely to think that things are going downhill than getting better.
01:22We've got what we call a rosy retrospection bias where we think the past was better than it was
01:28because we forget the bad from the past.
01:29So it makes us think that today is scarier and tomorrow is scarier than that past.
01:36So we've got this more polarized view of London when we should, you know,
01:40the aim is always to have a shared sense of the reality.
01:44And then we can have different opinions, but not different facts.
01:48The negative consequences of having a wrong idea of the facts on your own quality of life
01:52or economic success of cities and the country overall, all in the polarization and division that that all leads to.
