Barnham is safe in the unremarkable way most West Sussex commuter villages are. The crime rate sits at about 89 incidents per thousand people across the year to March. The wider Arun local-authority area runs at essentially the same figure. Around 1,300 incidents got recorded in the village over that twelve-month window. Level with the area around it, which is to say neither a safer pocket nor a rougher one.
The headline rate of about 89 incidents per thousand people covers the twelve months from April 2025 to March 2026. The Arun-wide figure for the same period runs within a fraction of a percent of that number, which is statistically the same thing. Barnham does not lift the wider average and it does not drag it down. What the parity tells you is that this is a village embedded in its district rather than an outlier in either direction. The total volume was around 1,300 incidents across the year, which is the count context for the rate. The split by category, the concentration by street, and the pattern across the days of the week are not part of the aggregate figure here. The honest version of the answer is the headline number itself: about average for Arun, well below city scale, and a long way below the rates that drive relocation decisions. For a buyer considering Barnham, the level-with-Arun result reads as fine on an insurance application and barely registers as a concern on a relocation checklist. It does not put Barnham in the league of the quietest rural pockets of West Sussex, but it does not put it anywhere near the rougher parts of the south-coast urban belt either. Anyone seriously planning to buy should still check the specific postcode in detail before exchange, because aggregate village averages always smooth out hotspots that exist at the address level.
The verdict is average, in the most boring sense of the word. About as safe as it gets without being remote, and about as risky as it gets without being urban.