FOI-2025-2972
You asked
Please can you supply if available for the following:
- Number of cars stolen
- Number of cars interfered with or tampered with (including taking parts from cars)
- Number of cars stolen as a result of the manipulation of remote locking signals
For each of the below time frames:
- Jan-June 2025
- July - Dec 2024
- Jan - June 2024
- July - Dec 2023
- Jan - June 2023
We said
Thank you for your request.
We produce vehicle crime data primarily from two sources:
Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) - a household victimisation survey that asks respondents about their experiences of crime in the last year, regardless of whether the incident was reported to the police;
Police recorded crime (from the Home Office) - offences that are reported to and/or recorded by police forces in England and Wales.
We produce the number of police recorded "theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle" and "interfering with a motor vehicle" offences by month in Table A5b of our Crime in England and Wales: Appendix tables.
We also produce the estimated number of thefts of vehicles from the CSEW in table A1 of our Crime in England and Wales: Appendix tables.
Table 6 of the Nature of crime: vehicle-related theft dataset provides CSEW data show the items stolen in incidents of theft from vehicles (including vehicle parts). Also within this dataset, Tables 3a to 3d shows the method of entry to vehicles, including if the offender manipulated signal from a remote locking device.
CSEW estimates are published based on interviews carried out over a 12-month period, therefore we do not hold analysis showing CSEW estimates for the six-month time periods you have requested.
Unfortunately, we do not hold statistics from the CSEW broken down by vehicle type (e.g. car). Whilst some information on this topic is gathered during survey collection, estimates based on this information would need to be created. Public authorities are not obliged to create new information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA). Therefore, this information is not held for FOI purposes. It may help to know that we have not created this information previously, as the sample sizes are not robust enough to produce reliable estimates. Therefore, even if we were to create this information, it could not be used to accurately measure rates of vehicle theft by type.