FOI 23527-25 Tool theft

Request to Northamptonshire Police:

1. What is the monetary value of tools (hand tools and power tools) your police force recovered that have been stolen from vehicles, construction sites and home premises' between December 1 2024 and December 1 2025? Are you able to identify these figures relating to tradespeople?

2. How many reports of tool theft has your police force received between December 1 2024 and December 1 2025 and what percentage of stolen tools have you recovered in that time period? Are you able to identify these figures relating to tradespeople?

Response:

Northamptonshire Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the production of statistical information for Freedom Of Information responses.

1. It is not a requirement of Northamptonshire Police to record the value of items stolen.
Officers are not qualified at giving a value of a particular item, nor are they able to factor in any age or wear & tear depreciation. Victims equally may give a value for items stolen as new replacement value, or the value of replacing with the same item of the same age and condition, including VAT or excluding VAT. Due to this, any information we do hold would not give an accurate picture of the total value of business or commercial related thefts.

Out of 389 crimes only 29 had a ‘property current value’ recorded.

Victim occupation is not a mandatory field and is often not recorded. 270 crimes had no occupation recorded. The following categories were used for ‘Tradespeople’:

Freedom Of Information legislation concerns recorded information within an organisation, public bodies are not obliged to create/work out data/percentages to facilitate such requests.

2. 397 reports. This is all tool thefts. 389 based on locations specified in Q1.
2 recovered. 18 reports relate to tradespeople, 0 recovered relate to tradespeople but please see above re occupation.

Please note, tools may be recovered but we are unable to link to a theft.

Rightful owners of tools, bike parts and more stolen from Northampton neighbourhood asked to come forward as three arrests made

Bid to reunite 150 items stolen from building sites across Northamptonshire to their owners

Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that the data has been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting the data.

The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when the data is used.

If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data, we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.