Vehicle Theft 2020-2025

Request

I am requesting the following information under the Freedom of Information Act, relating to vehicle thefts in your force area from 1st January 2020 to the most recent available data in 2025:

Q1. The number of recorded vehicle thefts (theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle – Home Office offence code 48), broken down by calendar year (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025 to date).

Q2. The number of those vehicles that were subsequently recovered, broken down by year if available.

Q3. The five most commonly stolen vehicle makes and models across the full period (2020–2025 to date).

Q4. If available, the three most common location types where vehicle thefts occurred (e.g. on-street, driveway, car park).

Q5. If held, the top three postcode districts in your force area with the highest number of vehicle thefts across the period (2020–2025 to date), including total theft numbers for each.

If this request exceeds the cost limit, please prioritise questions 1, 3 and 5, and let me know how it could be refined.

Response

I approached our Performance Review Unit for assistance with your request. An analyst within this unit has conducted a search of our Crime Management System - Connect which records complaints or allegations of those matters, which the Home Office specify should be recorded as 'crimes'. All our systems are designed and used first and foremost for Policing Purposes and have limited search capability. They provided me with the attatched spreadsheet in response and the following explanation regarding their search criteria:

Q1 – I have provided a count of the offence 48 – THEFT OR UNAUTHORISED TAKING OF A MOTOR VEHICLE, broken down by year recorded

Criteria used –

SYP & crime only filter

and       Incident Created Date is between 01/01/2020 and 31/07/2025

and       Classification Code is equal to / is in 48

Q2 – Based on the dataset from Q1, I have provided a further breakdown where the vehicle role is recorded as “RECOVERED”

Criteria used –

Incident Number is equal to any Incident Number in  2025/01915_Q1 & Q4

and       Vehicle Role is equal to / is in RECOVERED

Q3 – I have provided the top 5 Make Model types recorded, this dataset also includes the crimes recorded where there is no vehicle recorded on the investigation for context.

Criteria used –

Incident Number is equal to any Incident Number in  2025/01915_Q1 & Q4

Q4 - Based on the dataset from Q1, I have provided a further breakdown by crime location premises type for the top 3 location types and also included the count for crimes that do not have a premises type recorded on the investigation for context.

Criteria used –

SYP & crime only filter

and       Incident Created Date is between 01/01/2020 and 31/07/2025

and       Classification Code is equal to / is in 48

Q5 – I have provided a count of stolen vehicles recorded by crime location postcode for the top 3 postcodes and also included the count for crimes that do not have a postcode recorded for context.

Criteria used

Incident Number is equal to any Incident Number in  2025/01915_Q1 & Q4

Please note –

• Extracted on 12/08/2025. Data from CONNECT only. This is a live recording system and may be subject to change.
• It's worth noting that some fields used are not mandatory and require manual input.