FOI 15607-25 - Vehicle Thefts

Request:

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.

Response:

Search between January 2020 & 13^th August 2025 (inclusive) for all Occurrences with a crime type of Theft of a Motor Vehicle or Take a Motor Vehicle Without the Owner’s Consent, postcode district and location type.

Questions 1 and 2:

A number of descriptors may be applied to stolen vehicles. The data above reflect those vehicles that had the descriptor “recovered”. However, whether or not a vehicle was recovered does not reflect on its usability upon recovery. Furthermore, a vehicle may have been marked as “found” but not “recovered”, and would therefore not be included in the above numbers.

Question 3:

Ford Fiesta

Ford Focus

Ford Transit

Vauxhall Astra

Volkswagen Golf

A large number of records do not contain a vehicle make and model. The information above is provided on the basis of the information we do hold, but due to lack of data it may be inaccurate or misleading.

Question 4:

House

Open air car park

Street/road

Question 5:

NN3 – 630

NN8 – 474

NN1 – 471

Please note that this data should be interpreted with caution. Comparing numbers of crimes can be misleading and does not necessarily indicate the likelihood of someone being a victim of crime. In addition, the number of crimes recorded in an area over a period of time can be influenced by a number of factors. Consequently, statistics on crimes for one period may not necessarily be a good indicator of future crimes in that area.

The numerical data presented in this response is an unaudited snapshot of unpublished data sourced from "live" systems and is subject to the interpretation of the original request by the individual extracting the data.

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.

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 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.