Post Haste: We should try to stop car theft!
How the state failed to address a crime that is far from victimless
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By Ezra Cohen (@Ezra_Cohen_)
In 1993, the Home Office interviewed 100 car thieves. Besides producing interesting explanations for their actions (seen in bar chart form below), one common refrain was to downplay the severity of car theft. It is unsurprising that a criminal would justify their actions as a victimless crime. The problem is that, for many years, the same view seems to have coloured the British state’s response to car theft.
Statistics tell this story in a stark way. Each year around 130,000 vehicles are stolen in the UK. Yet the most recent figures show that a pitiful 2.12% of vehicle thefts led to criminal convictions. While local police forces will sometimes make efforts to recover the car, victims are often simply provided with a crime reference number to pass on to their insurance provider.
Car theft is a national problem to which the state is resolutely failing to provide a national solution.
The impact on victims
The proposition that the state should prosecute crimes should not require much explanation. Still, it is worth briefly reviewing the ways in which car theft visits suffering upon its victims – and on society at large.
The most tangible is the rise in insurance premiums. When car theft is not taken seriously, this is partly a consequence of an insurance system which generally protects any individual from bearing the financial cost of the theft. However, the cost must be borne somewhere, and that somewhere is with the law-abiding citizens who pay to insure their vehicles. Those worst hit are the victims of car theft, who see their premiums skyrocket by around £630 a year when they come to renew. The effects can also be devastating for those who need a vehicle to get to work.
Beyond these financial costs, victims of car theft point to far deeper scars from the experience. There is the sense of violation and fear, particularly when car keys are stolen from a home. There is also the deeper sense of hopelessness that comes from knowing there is so little prospect of recovery or consequence for the culprits.
Car theft 101
There is a relatively well-established process for how cars in the UK are stolen.
There are the more traditional means of forcing entry to the car or burgling a home to take the car keys. The more common culprit, however, is keyless car theft, where a thief will use technology to open the vehicle. A common variant, known as relay attack, involves opening a car by standing just outside a home to capture and relay the signal from the car keys.
Once the car has been taken, it will usually be left somewhere nearby to ‘cool off’. At this point, if the vehicle has a tracker device which the thieves have not managed to find and remove, police and insurance companies will recover the car. Criminals therefore know that they can leave the vehicle in place and if it is still there after a week or two, that more or less proves that the car has no working tracker device.
At that point, the vehicle will usually proceed along one of three paths:
Chop shop: Many vehicles will be taken to a ‘chop shop’, where they are broken into parts which are sold separately.
Export: A significant proportion will head overseas, usually to other countries with right hand drive like Cyprus, or to hubs like the Democratic Republic of Congo where they will travel onward to a final destination.
Clone: A smaller number are subject to a more complex process known as cloning. This involves finding a car which should have been struck off the UK’s system – either because it was dismantled or exported – and preserving its vehicle identification number (VIN). A similar vehicle can then be stolen and adapted to assume this car’s VIN and take on its appearance. Once that process is complete, the vehicle can be driven or sold without appearing as a stolen car in Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) or other surveillance systems.
A national problem highlights a national vacuum
While car theft is concentrated in certain areas – particularly Greater London and the West Midlands – no corner of the country escapes it. The crime is plainly a national problem, not only in its spread but also in its strategy. A recent report from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) raised the possibility that criminal organisations are moving stolen vehicles across jurisdictional boundaries specifically to exploit the limitations of local policing. Some also end up outside the UK. Evidently, any serious effort to counter this kind of crime requires a national policy response.
This brings us to the heart of the problem. While national networks of criminals steal vehicles from across the country, the task of responding is largely left to a disparate group of local police forces.
There is no shortage of national bodies that could, in theory, take the lead in tackling car theft. But the activities of each only underline how little is being done at the national level.
Take the National Crime Agency. Although one might imagine car theft is among the agency’s priorities, in reality the NCA is not involved in domestic investigations. In any case, the agency has generally struggled to the point where one recent report concluded that it was “on its knees”.
Opal, the national intelligence unit focused on serious organised acquisitive crime, would be another candidate to take on car theft. But whatever its potential, the resources provided to Opal are woefully insufficient. RUSI’s report included the incredible finding that, as of 2024, “At the national level, intelligence collection and dissemination are currently entrusted to a single Opal analyst”.
Then there are the bodies specifically set up to focus on vehicle theft. In 2024, the National Police Chiefs’ Council set up the National Vehicle Crime Reduction Partnership (NVCRP), with the stated intent to “bring together police, government and industry to reduce vehicle crime”. Yet here too, the proposed budget of £240,000 is out of all proportion to a car theft epidemic that, by the Government’s own estimates, costs the country around £1.8 billion a year.
Insurance firms and other private companies also provide funding for another national agency, the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service (NaVCIS). The fact that private companies have felt the need to back a law enforcement body is a dystopian illustration of the state’s failings.
NaVCIS is just as under-equipped as its fellow law enforcement agencies, relying on around £2 million in funding from private partners as well as some £250,000 in state backing.
The end result is that there are three national agencies, all of which collectively receive mere hundreds of thousands of pounds in public funds to address vehicle theft and none of which can claim strategic oversight of the state’s response to the crime.
When the Government announced in January 2026 that there would be a greater focus on national policing and the creation of a National Police Service (NPS), one might have expected car theft to appear prominently in that new strategy. But the published policy paper did not reference vehicle theft, even though it may be the best example of a crime that is crying out for a national response.
Things appear little better at the regional level. Across the UK, nine Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) have been set up specifically to tackle issues that operate above the level of a local police force. For example, there is a dedicated ROCU in the car theft hotspot of the West Midlands. Yet in response to a freedom of information request I submitted asking how many full-time equivalent (FTE) staff members were assigned to car theft within their ROCU over the last three financial years, West Midlands Police replied that their ROCU had “no dedicated resource” in that time period.
A national solution
A proper response to the problem must start with empowering a national crime-fighting body, whether that is the NPS or an existing agency like NaVCIS. It also follows that this law enforcement effort will require serious funding.
In the first instance, this could support the simple expansion of standard policing tactics. Even with their extremely limited resources, local police forces and NaVCIS have been able to claim some success tracking vehicles and disrupting their export. Additional funding could enable those operations to move from sporadic to systematic.
Additional funds would also allow the police to correct obvious oversights. A recent Channel 4 documentary showed how car thieves at one notorious industrial site appeared to be using a jamming device to conceal the signal emitted by a stolen car’s tracker. Forthcoming legislation will mean that it is generally illegal to own jamming devices, creating an opportunity to focus on identifying their use as a first step to disrupting vehicle theft operations.
Another potential vulnerability in the car theft process is the cooling off stage. At present, insurers will insist on recovering the car at that point. Thieves can rely on that fact to distinguish between cars with and without well-concealed trackers. A national police body, however, could disrupt vehicle theft by leaving stolen cars even when they have been identified in order to uncover more about a criminal operation. Part of the force’s budget could then be used to compensate insurers if this tactic results in the permanent loss of a car.
Beyond these immediate tactics, there is a need for much deeper research on how the state can effectively counter the main modes of theft. For example, new technologies or tactics should be able to target the export of stolen vehicles at ports. Producing this research would be another focus of the national body tasked with countering vehicle theft.
This national effort would require significantly more funding than the amounts currently given to agencies like NaVCIS. The flipside, however, is that even a small sum would represent a transformative uplift. Devoting £50 million to the effort would represent a 0.25% increase in the policing budget but would entail a radical multiplication of the resources devoted to combating car theft. At the Centre for British Progress, we have previously proposed a range of policies which would cover this kind of minimal cost. For example, enforcing existing laws against companies which hold UK property and hide their beneficial ownership would raise around £50 million.
Repairing trust
The significance of stopping car theft goes well beyond disrupting criminal networks or arresting the rise of insurance premiums. The UK is experiencing a slow-burning crisis of receding faith in institutions. That lack of trust goes well beyond central government. Between 2024 and 2025, confidence in local police and the courts collapsed by more than 10%. Nearly 70% say that the police have “given up trying to solve lower-level crimes”.
The immediate political case for action makes itself. With a conviction rate of just 2%, the only way is up. At some point, a government will make the minimal investment required to begin the national fightback against car theft and claim credit for the results that follow. Now is as good a time as any.
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