Yes, Holbury is a little safer than the New Forest district around it. Crime runs slightly below the district rate. Theft is less common here than in the country as a whole. Unemployment barely registers. The most alarming thing on the horizon is an industrial chimney, and chimneys don't appear in police figures.
Across the year from June 2025 to May 2026, police recorded 595 crimes in Holbury, a published rate of about 54 per 1,000 residents. That's roughly 6% below the New Forest average. It won't make anyone's list of crime hotspots, and it won't win any prizes for being the quietest village either.
Side by side, the numbers are close: about 54 crimes per 1,000 residents in Holbury against about 57 across the New Forest as a whole. The gap is small. Anyone treating a gap of a few crimes per thousand as proof of either paradise or decline is reading more into the figures than they hold.
For context, Holbury has about 3,300 people per square kilometre, which puts it at the busy end of a district mostly known for ponies and heath. Unemployment is about 2%, and about 2% of households are overcrowded. That describes a working village with jobs close by and houses big enough for the people in them. None of it explains the crime figures on its own. It only tells you what sort of place produces them.
The mix needs reading with care. Violence and sexual offences make up about 50% of recorded crime in Holbury, against about 35% nationally. It sounds worse than it is: the category is the largest almost everywhere, it covers a wide legal range including common assault with no injury, and here it's a larger share of a total that is already below the district average. Anti-social behaviour is about 16% of crime, the same as the national share. Criminal damage and arson (about 7%) and public order offences (also about 7%) are both in line with the national shares. Shoplifting is about 5% here against about 8% nationally, and other theft about 4% against about 7%. That's what happens in a village with a modest parade of shops and no shopping centre worth robbing.
What happens after a report is a different question, and it covers the whole force, not the village. Hampshire Constabulary charged a suspect in about 9% of cases over the year to May 2026, against about 12% nationally. That puts it 38th of 42 forces. About 35% of its cases closed with no suspect identified. None of this measures how safe Holbury is. It tells you that if something is stolen, getting it back is a long shot, and that applies across the county, not only here.
Safety is one of Holbury's stronger points. The overall level sits a little under the district, theft sits under the national norm, and the violence figure looks bigger than it is because of what the category includes.