THAMES Valley is among the areas of the UK seeing the highest rates of car theft, a new study has shown.
Car insurance company Zego has analysed car theft figures from the Office for National Statistics, ranking the areas of the country which see the most vehicles stolen.
Areas were split into police forces, with figures broken down into average yearly car thefts per 10,000 people and average thefts logged per day.
Car theft rates for the year period 2023-2024 and population estimates for all police force areas were gathered from the Office for National Statistics.
Once all data was collated, it was aggregated to calculate the average number of car thefts per 10,000 people, along with the average number of car thefts per day for each UK area.
London topped the ranking Metropolitan Police logged the most daily incidents overall, at 288, as well as the highest yearly number per 10,000 people, at 118.
It saw a total of more than 105,000 in statistics logged for the 2023-2024 period.
The West Midlands ranked second worst, with 114 thefts logged per 10,000 people per year, followed by Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.
Thames Valley ranked fifth, logging 37 thefts per day on average– around 57 thefts for every 10,000 people per year.
The 2023-2024 period saw more than 13,500 thefts in the region.
This means a car theft is logged in Thames Valley once every 38 minutes.
Essex ranked in sixth, followed by South Yorkshire in seventh, Avon and Somerset in eighth, and Kent in ninth.
Hampshire rounded out the top ten.
Last year, Thames Valley’s Police and Crime Commissioner revealed that vehicle crime was down 13% overall.
Thames Valley’s figures were comparable to the whole of Wales, which also saw around 32 car thefts a day– a yearly average of 37 per 10,000 people.
Data was compiled an analysed by car insurance company Zego.
More information is available via: zego.com/car-insurance
