Yes, Lechlade-on-Thames is a safe town, with less recorded crime per head than the rest of Cotswold district. The town's rate is about a fifth below the district's. It's under two hundred crimes in a year. Car crime and burglary come up more often than the national mix would suggest, but on numbers small enough to swing from one year to the next. Whether the police catch anyone is a separate question, and the answer is less flattering.
Police recorded 188 crimes in Lechlade-on-Thames in the twelve months from June 2025 to May 2026, a published rate of about 33 per 1,000 residents. That's roughly 18% below the average for Cotswold district.
For the district as a whole, Cotswold District Council's area ran at about 40 crimes per 1,000 residents over the same year, against about 33 in the town.
About 1,360 people live in each square kilometre of the town, unemployment is about 2%, and about 1% of households are overcrowded. That makes Lechlade a compact, employed and roomy town, and none of those three numbers explains the crime figure on its own.
By type, violence and sexual offences were 35% of the town's recorded crime against 35% nationally. That's the same share, from a category that includes common assault without injury and is the largest almost everywhere. Anti-social behaviour was 17% against 16% nationally, and criminal damage and arson 7% against 7%, both close to the national share. The ones that stand out are other theft at 12% against 7% nationally, vehicle crime at 10% against 5%, and burglary at 8% against 4%. With only 188 crimes in the year, though, a few break-ins or a bad month for car crime can move those shares by several points, so this is one year's snapshot and may not repeat. The police.uk street map lets you check the specific road you're buying on over the last few months, and that tells you more than the town-wide shares do.
Gloucestershire Constabulary, which polices the whole county, charges a suspect in about 9% of cases, against about 12% nationally, and ranks 39th of 42 forces on that measure. About 33% of its cases close with no suspect identified. Those are force-wide numbers about what happens after a crime is reported, and they say nothing about how often crime happens in Lechlade. In this town, it happens less often than across the rest of the district.
Lechlade-on-Thames is one of the safer places in Cotswold district: crime is below the district rate, and the categories that stand out rest on small numbers. Of all the things a buyer has to weigh up here, crime is near the bottom of the list.