Is your car a target?
Driveway risk check
Monthly alert
We'll email you when new police data shows car crime rising near your postcode. One email a month, unsubscribe any time.
Add it to your site
Free for local news sites, residents' groups and neighbourhood watch pages.
How this checker works
Data. Crime figures come from police.uk, the official open data for all forces in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Postcodes are converted to a location using postcodes.io (ONS data).
Area. We show crimes police.uk places within roughly one mile of the postcode's centre.
What counts. "Vehicle crime" is police.uk's category for theft of a vehicle, theft from a vehicle and vehicle interference.
- Locations are moved to a nearby anonymous point to protect victims, so map dots are approximate.
- Data is usually about two months behind.
- police.uk records the month only, not the day or time.
- Scotland is not covered.
- Outcomes shown are the latest recorded for each crime and can change.
Area comparison. Home Office police recorded crime open data (released 22 October 2026), offence code 48, theft or unauthorised taking of a motor vehicle, by Community Safety Partnership and police force. Some councils are grouped, for example Basingstoke and Deane, Hart and Rushmoor are reported together as North Hampshire. Where councils have merged since (such as Buckinghamshire or Cumberland), we add up the older areas the Home Office still reports. Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole uses Bournemouth and Poole only, as Christchurch is reported within Dorset. Rates per 1,000 people use ONS mid-2025 population estimates. Areas with fewer than 20,000 people, Humberside (data being corrected) and the Kent areas with incomplete data are left out of the ranking. Counts are offences, not rates per head.
Recovery and charges. Vehicles stolen in 2025 with no recovered marker as of 31 July 2026: 46,605 of 91,792, DVLA FOI response FOIR13623. Recovery by make: DVLA FOI response FOIR12863, 2024 thefts, all vehicle types for each make. Van figures: DVLA FOI response FOIR13645, January to July 2026. Charge rate: BBC investigation, October 2026.
When and where. ONS, Nature of crime: vehicle-related theft, year ending March 2025, tables 1b and 2b (theft of vehicles only). Evening or night: 75%. At or near home: 67% (semi-private 37%, private 14%, street outside 16%). Small survey sample of around 100 incidents.
Theft rates by model. Vehicles recorded as stolen in 2024 (DVLA FOI response FOIR12863), matched to licensed cars in Great Britain at the end of 2024 (DfT table VEH0120), for models with at least 20,000 licensed. Some stolen cars couldn't be matched to a model, so rates are best read as minimums.
Latest data. We use the 12 most recent months police.uk has published. Some forces publish late; if your force is behind, the 12 months end at its last published month, and the results say so.
Risk score. We measured vehicle crime within about a mile of 1,483 randomly chosen police neighbourhoods across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, over the same 12 months (September 2025 to August 2026), exactly as this checker does for your postcode. Your score shows where your postcode sits: 10 means more vehicle crime than at least 90% of those areas. Busy town centres score higher because more people and cars are there, so it measures how much vehicle crime happens nearby, not your personal chance of being a victim.
Most stolen list. DVLA data on cars recorded as stolen in 2025, as analysed by What Car? and reported by Fleet News. These are totals, not rates.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Map © OpenStreetMap contributors. Stratfield Protection, driveway security bollards for Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey.