FOI disclosures from West Yorkshire Police and Avon and Somerset Police show a clear difference between recorded policing outcomes at Leeds Festival and Glastonbury between 2022 and 2025.
Glastonbury is the larger event by a wide margin. The festival’s own history page lists its 2025 capacity as 210,000, while Associated Press described the 2025 festival as covering around 1,000 acres of Worthy Farm and temporarily turning Pilton into one of the largest population centres in the UK. Leeds Festival is still a major event, but public guides generally place it well below Glastonbury’s scale, with Discover Leeds describing Bramham Park as a temporary city of roughly 75,000 people a day, while another festival guide gives an estimated capacity range of 85,000 to 95,000.
That size difference makes the policing figures worth comparing. Glastonbury had the larger disclosed police deployment total, but Leeds recorded substantially more arrests across the same four-year period.
Between 2022 and 2025, Avon and Somerset Police recorded 3,533 officer deployments, 116 arrests, and 28 people stop-searched within the Glastonbury festival footprint. The figures come from a Freedom of Information response published on WhatDoTheyKnow, covering officer deployments, stop-searches, arrests, outcomes and drug seizures at Glastonbury.
Over the same four festival years, West Yorkshire Police recorded 3,088 officer deployments, 203 arrests, and 13 stop-searches at Leeds Festival. Those figures were covered in an earlier Reasonable Adjustment article on Leeds Festival policing FOI data, arrests and deployments.
| Festival | Years | Officer deployments | Arrests | Stop-searches / people searched |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Glastonbury | 2022-2025 | 3,533 | 116 | 28 |
| Leeds Festival | 2022-2025 | 3,088 | 203 | 13 |
The figures aren’t a direct measure of crime, safety, police effectiveness or festival behaviour. Arrest totals depend on what happens on site, what gets reported, what gets detected, how incidents are recorded, how private security works with police, and what each force prioritises. An officer deployment also isn’t the same as a unique officer, and the figures don’t show how long each deployment lasted.
Even with those limits, the comparison is clear. Glastonbury recorded more officer deployments and is the much larger festival, but Leeds recorded 87 more arrests.
Using the deployment totals as a rough comparison, Glastonbury recorded around one arrest for every 30 officer deployments. Leeds Festival recorded around one arrest for every 15 officer deployments. That shouldn’t be treated as a formal arrest rate, but it does show a heavier recorded arrest pattern at Leeds relative to the disclosed deployment total.
The stop-search figures are low at both events. Glastonbury recorded 28 people stop-searched across four years. Leeds recorded 13 stop-searches across the same period. Set against thousands of officer deployments and more than 300 arrests across the two datasets, the arrest picture doesn’t appear to be driven mainly by large volumes of formal stop-searches inside the festival footprints.
That pattern sits alongside wider questions about how policing data is recorded and disclosed. The same issue appears in other FOI work, including The Reasonable Adjustment’s article on Met Police speeding case data for 2025, where headline numbers were only useful once the limits of the records were properly understood.
Arrests can come through other routes, including reports from festival security, officers responding to incidents, direct observation, searches after arrest, intelligence-led work, or offences coming to police attention during wider event policing.
At Glastonbury, the arrest figures rose after 2022, but stayed below the Leeds Festival total. Avon and Somerset Police recorded 13 arrests in 2022, 33 in 2023, 34 in 2024, and 36 in 2025. Drug offences made up a large part of the Glastonbury arrest data, especially in 2023, when 25 of 33 arrests were recorded as drug offences.
| Year | Glastonbury total arrests | Glastonbury drug offence arrests |
|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 13 | 7 |
| 2023 | 33 | 25 |
| 2024 | 34 | 14 |
| 2025 | 36 | 14 |
The 2023 Glastonbury figure stands out, but the FOI response doesn’t explain the reason for it. It could reflect offending levels, intelligence, policing priorities, recording practice, or a mix of those factors. The disclosure gives the totals, not the operational explanation behind them.
The drug figures also sit in a wider events context. Drug policing at festivals is often discussed as if it only concerns illegal possession or supply, but event access issues can be more complicated where prescribed medicines are involved. The Reasonable Adjustment has separately covered prescribed medical cannabis at events and festivals, including the problems that can arise when venues, security staff or organisers don’t distinguish clearly between lawful prescribed medication and unlawful drug possession.
There’s also a difference in how the two forces handled deployment transparency. For Glastonbury, Avon and Somerset Police disclosed yearly totals for uniformed and non-uniformed officers. The force recorded 771 uniformed and 308 non-uniformed deployments in 2022, 702 uniformed and 90 non-uniformed in 2023, 702 uniformed and 123 non-uniformed in 2024, and 653 uniformed and 184 non-uniformed in 2025.
| Year | Uniformed | Non-uniformed | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 771 | 308 | 1,079 |
| 2023 | 702 | 90 | 792 |
| 2024 | 702 | 123 | 825 |
| 2025 | 653 | 184 | 837 |
Avon and Somerset added an important caveat. “Non-uniformed” doesn’t simply mean undercover officers in the crowd. The force said the category includes non-frontline officers such as CID, and explained that a dip in non-uniformed officers was due to CID being located outside the festival footprint during that year.
That means the figure shouldn’t be used as a clean count of covert officers. It is still useful because it gives a broad view of the policing footprint Avon and Somerset was willing to disclose.
Avon and Somerset did withhold shift-level deployment information under section 31 of the Freedom of Information Act, the law enforcement exemption. The force argued that releasing officer numbers at specific times could reveal staffing patterns and create operational risk at future festivals. It still disclosed annual totals and the uniformed/non-uniformed breakdown.
West Yorkshire Police took a more restrictive approach with Leeds Festival. It refused to disclose the equivalent broad uniformed/non-uniformed split.
The Glastonbury response also included a drug seizure spreadsheet for 2023, 2024 and 2025. Avon and Somerset Police said the figures only cover police interactions and seizures, not seizures made by Glastonbury staff or contractors. That means the data shouldn’t be treated as a complete record of all drug-related activity at the festival.
The spreadsheet includes substances recorded as cannabis, cocaine, ketamine, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, diazepam, gabapentin, morphine, nitrous oxide and unknown substances. It also includes mixed units, estimated quantities, “not tested” entries, “not weighed” entries, spelling variation and incomplete recording. For 2025, Avon and Somerset recorded 10 incidents where the substance and quantity weren’t recorded.
Those limits affect how confidently the seizure data can be summarised, especially when comparing substances or quantities across years. The spreadsheet is still useful, but it’s not a clean public dashboard. It’s an operational record, with all the messiness that comes with that.
Taken together, the two FOI disclosures show different recorded policing patterns at two major UK festivals. Glastonbury had the larger disclosed police deployment total and is the larger event, but Leeds recorded more arrests. Both festivals had low stop-search numbers compared with their deployment totals. Drug offences were prominent in both datasets, although the available detail differs.
The responses also show different approaches to disclosure. Avon and Somerset released broad uniformed and non-uniformed deployment figures for Glastonbury, while West Yorkshire Police withheld the equivalent category data for Leeds Festival.
The comparison doesn’t explain every difference between the two events. It does give a clearer starting point than assumption. Once the deployment, arrest, stop-search and seizure figures are placed side by side, the recorded picture looks very different from one festival to the other.
Source material and further reading
- Glastonbury Festival policing outcomes and drug seizures FOI response on WhatDoTheyKnow
- Leeds Festival policing FOI, arrests and deployments
- Prescribed medical cannabis at events and festivals
- Met Police speeding cases FOI, 2025
- Glastonbury Festival 2025 official history page
- Associated Press: Glastonbury 2025 by the numbers
- Discover Leeds guide to Leeds Festival
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