British cars are being stolen and shipped within a day, fueling a multi-billion-pound crime bill

CNBC

2 days ago

Cars are being stolen and shipped from the U.K. within 24 hours, according to a new report which found thefts are costing British consumers and the economy billions of pounds.
Organized criminal gangs are driving the surge in car thefts in the country, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defense and security think tank said in a report published Thursday, with U.K. vehicle theft rising by 75% in the past decade to about 130,000 vehicles a year.
The cars that are being stolen are not just high-end vehicles like Range Rovers or Rolls-Royces, but everyday models like the Ford Fiesta or Focus and Volkswagen Golf, according to data on the most stolen makes and models.
They can be relatively easily snatched by organized crime gangs who use and adapt sophisticated vehicle theft technologies, which are quickly adapted when car manufacturers roll out anti-theft countermeasures, to steal cars.
Organized crime groups' techniques, networks and tried-and-tested smuggling routes mean that cars are "stolen, loaded and taken out of the U.K. within a day," RUSI said in its analysis, noting that vehicle theft is no longer a low-level, opportunistic crime, but rather a high-value, low-risk form of serious and organized crime with domestic and international dimensions.
"What we really stress in the findings is the fact that it's a certain make or model today, but if that gets engineered out [with technological advances to counter theft], or the demand shifts, it will be another tomorrow," Elijah Glantz, a research fellow for the Organised Crime and Policing Team at RUSI and one of the report's co-authors, told CNBC.
Criminals have become emboldened and better organized, able to relatively easily supply markets where vehicles are expensive or in short supply, and where demand is high for parts or entire vehicles.
Some key export markets for stolen high-value cars were said to include the United Arab Emirates, Georgia in the Caucasus, Cyprus (which, like the U.K., has left-hand drive) and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The overall increases in the cost of parts and vehicles and shortfall of supply in those markets "drive people to look for the cheapest alternative, which in many cases might be sourced from the illicit market and originally stolen off a drive," Glantz said.
CNBC has contacted the U.K.'s National Crime Agency, an agency that investigates serious and organized crime, about the findings of the report.
Aside from the personal costs of stolen cars for owners, vehicle thefts are having a significant impact on U.K. drivers and the wider economy.
"Vehicle theft now costs the U.K. economy about £1.77 billion [$2.43 billion] a year and has driven an 82% increase in car insurance premium quotes since 2021," with the costs compounded by increasing repair costs, vehicle prices and wider economic pressures, Glantz and RUSI co-authors Mark Williams and Alastair Greig found.
The estimated £1.77 billion refers to a social and economic "cost of crime" metric, based on data collected by the U.K. Home Office and refers to the money that goes into prevention of crime, the economic damage caused to the victim, whether it's a commercial business or individual, and the cost of remediating the theft.
"The cost of vehicles has gone up, the cost of insurance has gone up. Vehicle manufacturers have poured an enormous amount of money into safeguarding their vehicles, so the cost of the crime has gone up, and the overall volume of crime has also gone up. So that 1.77 billion really is a very lower bound figure," he said.
Of course, car theft and illegal exporting isn't confined to the U.K. — Canada, for example, has seen an increase in stolen cars being sent to Central and West Africa— but there are some specific problems that make the U.K. more vulnerable to such crime, such as its geographical location, the fact it's an island, and the prioritizing of violent crime by its budget-constrained police force.
"The U.K. is obviously a global trading partner that has many, many interactions and trade relationships with the UAE and Africa and elsewhere, and there's also a point of vulnerability in ports," Glantz said, with port officials spending a lot of time checking what's coming into the ports, but not a lot of time checking on what's going out.
"As a result, the systems are quite vulnerable," Glantz said.