Yes, on every published measure that matters. The headline crime rate sits at about 46 incidents per thousand residents per year. The Fareham borough average is closer to 60 per thousand, which means Lee runs roughly 23 percent below the area it formally belongs to. There were about 1,235 recorded incidents over the twelve months to March 2026. By south-coast standards the postcode sits clearly toward the quiet end.
A rate of about 46 per thousand sounds bigger than it lives. The published comparison with the wider borough is the honest one. Fareham as a local-authority area covers a lot of inland ground and a lot of the borough's busier corners, whose patterns are noisier than the coastal residential streets at Lee's end. The place itself reads as a different statistical animal: an older population with a median age of about 51, around four in five households owning the house they live in, and an area sitting in the second-most-affluent decile of the Index of Multiple Deprivation nationally. About a fifth of households are pensioners living alone. Affluent, retired, and owner-occupied is not a profile that produces much recorded crime, and the figures reflect that. The published rate is also the only figure worth quoting on benchmarking grounds. Dividing the 1,235-incident headline by the resident population is a tempting but misleading shortcut, because the police-reported rate uses a different statistical area and a different population base. The two numbers exist for different purposes, and only the rate is meant to be benchmarked against the borough.
The comparison with the borough's louder corners is the other instructive piece. A council boundary on a map is a geometric line; the boundary between quiet residential streets and a busier urban centre is a behavioural one. Lee sits on the quiet side of that behavioural line and reads accordingly in the data. It does not mean nothing happens here. It means what happens here is small in volume and unremarkable in category, the kind of background-noise risk any postcode of this profile carries. Buyers worried about safety in Lee are usually buyers who have compared it against an urban centre and forgotten to adjust for what they were actually looking at.
Safer than typical, and meaningfully safer than the borough it formally sits inside.