UK Van Theft Figures Hit Record in 2025

Between January and March 2025, police forces across England and Wales recorded just over 14800 van thefts, a 19 percent increase on the same quarter last year and the highest quarterly total since the Home Office began breaking out van specific data in 2019. The numbers have been climbing steadily for three years, and nobody working in fleet management or insurance is especially surprised by the direction, though the pace of the increase has started to worry people who assumed the trend would level off. West Midlands Police logged more than 1600 incidents in that quarter, with Greater Manchester at roughly 1400, and beyond those two force areas, the numbers drop off quickly enough to suggest the problem is heavily concentrated. The method is usually a relay attack on keyless entry, which tells you something about the sophistication level involved.

Paul Ashford manages a fleet of 80 delivery vans for a distribution company based in Walsall. He had three vehicles stolen between November 2024 and February 2025. Two were found. One turned up in a residential street in Wolverhampton, nine days after, the other at a scrapyard near Stoke after almost three weeks. Both had been stripped of catalytic converters, tools, and anything else worth removing. The third van was never found. According to the Home Office data, the national recovery rate for stolen vans is around 46 percent. Ashford's experience sits roughly in line with that average if you're willing to count a stripped shell at a scrapyard as a successful recovery. The insurance paid out on all three but didn't come close to covering the real cost once you factor in downtime, replacement rentals, and the tools that were inside the vans when they were taken. "You get maybe 60 or 70 percent of what it actually costs you," Ashford told me. "And that's if the insurer doesn't fight you on the valuation."

Certain industrial estates appear in police theft reports with alarming regularity, sometimes three or four times in a single month, and operators who get hit once tend to get targeted again within 90 days. Mark Hennessy, a fleet security consultant based in Birmingham, said he can name specific postcodes in the West Midlands that come up so frequently he's stopped being surprised by them. Sarah Keane, who manages operations for a courier company in Trafford, told a similar story about Greater Manchester. Her firm had two Sprinters taken from the same car park within six weeks of each other last autumn, the first without any tracker fitted and never recovered. After that, the company put GPS devices on every vehicle in the fleet, and when the second van was taken in December, the tracker started transmitting its position within seconds. Police were given live location data and recovered the van at a lockup in Oldham about four hours later, fully intact. Keane estimated the device cost under £100 and the recovery saved around £35000 in replacement and insurance excess costs, though she pointed out that the police took nearly two hours to respond to the data she provided and that two hours was apparently a good result.

The delay between a tracker alert and police action is something every fleet operator I've spoken to about theft raises unprompted. A specialist at www.gpswox.com put the average time from motion alert to police call at about eight minutes for fleets running real time tracking, though that's drawn from their own platform data and probably reflects more engaged operators than the industry norm. After that phone call, you wait. How long it takes depends on the force area, the time of night, whether a unit is available, and the range runs from about 40 minutes to several hours or, in some cases, the next working day. West Midlands Police didn't respond to a request for comment on response times for tracked vehicle thefts. Greater Manchester Police said they "prioritise live tracking information where available" but wouldn't give figures.

Association of British Insurers figures show commercial vehicle theft claims reached about £160 million in 2024, up from £130 million the year before, and the average claim for an unrecovered van came in just under £28000, including contents, tools, and business interruption. For fleets of 20 or 30 vehicles running without any tracking, a single theft in a bad quarter can wipe out operating margin, and two or three in one year will push premiums up 30 to 40 percent at renewal, regardless of what the operator does about security after the fact. I've spoken to fleet managers who had premiums raised after recovering a stolen vehicle intact because the insurer treated the theft itself as evidence of risk. Ashford in Walsall said his premiums went up about £15000 across the fleet after the three incidents, even though two vans were eventually found. "They don't care that you got them back in bits," he said. "They care that you got hit three times.”

At least two leasing companies in the UK have started fitting covert GPS trackers to vans before delivery as a standard condition of the lease, not something the customer opts into, but something built into the contract. One of them, a Manchester based firm that didn't want to be identified because their security setup is part of how they compete, installs battery powered devices in concealed locations and doesn't always tell the lessee exactly where they are. Their fleet risk manager said they recovered eleven vehicles in the past year using trackers that the drivers didn't even know about. "The lessees find out the tracker exists when we ring them and say we've found their van," he said. Whether customers should be informed about the device up front is a question the leasing industry doesn't appear keen to address, and when I asked this particular firm about it, they changed the subject to their recovery rate, which they said runs at about 80 percent against a national average below 50. Several commercial insurers now offer premium reductions of 10 to 20 percent for fleets with verified tracking, and for leasing companies that already bear the replacement cost when a vehicle gets stolen, the maths on fitting a £50 device is not complicated.

Whether the record quarter represents genuinely more criminal activity or just a market that has gotten better at detecting and reporting theft is something nobody can answer with any confidence. Van theft has historically been underreported for straightforward reasons. Owner operators and small fleets often don't call the police when they assume nothing will happen, and when they do report it, the crime reference number mostly exists for the insurance claim rather than any realistic expectation of investigation. The growing number of tracked vehicles in leased fleets has changed the picture too, because thefts are now being detected and logged that a few years ago would have gone entirely unrecorded. Keane in Trafford thinks the real number is comfortably higher than what police forces report. Hennessy agrees but won't guess by how much. The Q1 figures are compiled from early returns covering 38 of the 43 territorial police forces in England and Wales.