Great Notley is a safe place to live, and a good deal safer than the district around it. Crime here runs about a quarter below the Braintree average. Unemployment is low. Hardly anyone is squeezed into too small a home. What crime there is comes in roughly the same mix as anywhere else in the country, just less of it.
Essex Police recorded 471 crimes in Great Notley in the year to May 2026, a published rate of about 47 for every 1,000 residents. That is roughly 27% below the average for Braintree district over the same twelve months. A full year of figures means one rowdy weekend cannot rewrite the picture, and the picture is a calm one.
Set side by side, the two numbers are about 47 crimes per 1,000 residents in Great Notley against about 64 per 1,000 across Braintree district as a whole. Buyers who see Braintree in the crime tables and assume the worst for every village in it are reading the district total and skipping the village figure, which is the one that applies to them.
The neighbourhood behind those numbers is built-up but uncrowded. Population density averages about 3,860 people per square kilometre across the estates, unemployment is about 2%, and only about 1% of households are overcrowded. That describes a commuter village of family houses with jobs to go to and room to spare, and none of it is the texture that usually fills a police log.
The biggest category in the twelve months was violence and sexual offences at about 40% of the total, against about 35% nationally, a broad legal grouping that runs from serious assault down to common assault with no injury. Anti-social behaviour came next at about 17%, close to the national 16%, followed by other theft at about 10% against 7%, criminal damage and arson at about 9% against 7%, public order at about 6% against 7%, and vehicle crime at about 5% against 5%. The totals are small enough that a handful of incidents can move any of those shares by several points, so the mix is a snapshot of one year and could look different the next. To see what has been reported near a particular house, the police's own street-level crime map for the postcode is the place to look.
Once a crime is reported, the charge rate belongs to the force and not to the village. Essex Police charges a suspect in about 11% of cases, against about 12% nationally, which puts it 28th of 42 forces in England and Wales. About 37% of its cases are closed with no suspect identified. Those figures describe how the whole Essex force performs after the event, and they say nothing about how often anything happens in Great Notley in the first place.
On safety, Great Notley does as well as a buyer could reasonably hope: well below its own district on crime, with nothing in the numbers that should keep a family awake.