UK car theft report: monthly police data
Trackerstop's UK car theft report tracks police-recorded vehicle crime around 84 town and city centres in England and Wales, month by month. The newest edition covers September 2026: 2,811 offences, 7% higher than August 2026.
Read the September 2026 report
Every edition
| Edition | Towns | Offences | On the month before | On a year earlier | Busiest town |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | 84 | 2,811 | +7% | +4% | Birmingham city centre |
Method and limits
- Source. Street-level crime published by police.uk, category "vehicle crime", which joins theft of a vehicle, theft from a vehicle and interference with a vehicle. It is not limited to whole cars driven away.
- Panel. Each report counts offences within one mile of a fixed set of town and city centre points. Each comparison in a report uses the same points for every month shown, so changes are like for like.
- Coverage. England and Wales. Police Scotland does not publish street-level data to police.uk, and Greater Manchester Police has supplied none since 2019, so both are left out rather than shown as zero.
- Timing. police.uk usually releases a month six to eight weeks after it ends. This page checks twice a week and publishes the new edition, with its CSV, as soon as the figures appear.
- Frozen figures. Each edition keeps the numbers it was published with. Outcomes for recent offences are often still open, so the share closed with no suspect is an early reading.
- National scale. Whole-country theft counts come from DVLA stolen-vehicle records, released once a year.
The September 2026 panel: Barnsley, Basildon, Bath, Bedford, Birmingham city centre, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Bradford, Brighton, Bristol, Cambridge, Canterbury, Cardiff, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Cheltenham, Chester, Chesterfield, Colchester, Coventry, Crawley, Croydon, Darlington, Derby, Doncaster, Dudley, Durham, Enfield Town, Exeter, Gloucester, Guildford, Hereford, Huddersfield, Hull, Ilford, Ipswich, Kingston upon Thames, Leeds, Leicester, Lincoln, Liverpool city centre, Loughborough, Luton, Maidstone, Mansfield, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Newcastle upon Tyne, Newport, Northampton, Norwich, Nottingham, Nuneaton, Oxford, Peterborough, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Reading, Romford, Rotherham, Sheffield city centre, Shrewsbury, Slough, Solihull, Southampton, Southend-on-Sea, Stafford, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Swansea, Swindon, Telford, Wakefield, Walsall, Warrington, Watford, Wembley, West Bromwich, Wolverhampton, Worcester, Wrexham, York.
For journalists and researchers
Every figure is free to quote with a credit to Trackerstop and a link to the edition you used. Each edition has its own citation line and CSV download, and the full twelve-month picture is in the UK Vehicle Theft Index. For a town not on the panel, the free theft risk checker scores any postcode in Great Britain. Questions: sales@trackerstop.co.uk.
Local detail
Town-by-town history, street hotspots and outcomes are on the vehicle crime by town pages, and the models thieves favour are on car theft risk by model.