Car theft hot spots revealed

London and Manchester have the highest levels of car theft, while Devon and Cornwall and North Yorkshire are at the other end of the scale, .

IntelligentCarLeasing.com has revealed the areas with the highest and lowest rates of car theft per head of population, on the back of an FOI request to which 42 police forces across England and Wales responded.

Each force provided details of how many cars had been reported stolen over the 10-year period between 2003-2013. This data was then crossed with local population sizes, to produce what the leasing company calls “a revealing comparable set of results”.

The five police force areas with the highest levels of car theft per head were City of London, Greater Manchester, Metropolitan Police Service, Thames Valley and Warwickshire. The five areas with the lowest levels were Devon and Cornwall, North Yorkshire, Hampshire, Hertfordshire and Norfolk.

The data indicates that the number of cars reported as being stolen across the UK in the past 10 years has been steadily declining, with the number ‘plummeting’ between 2012 and 2013 (see graph below).

While the data indicates almost 5% more car thefts per head in the south of England than in the north, this is due to a high number of thefts in the City of London. If these are removed from calculations, there are more thefts in the north of England.