Insurers are having to pay out close to £1.5 billion a year over vehicle thefts in England and Wales, a new study has found.
A Freedom of Information request by Kent-based Claims Management and Adjusting (CMA) has also found that though vehicle theft numbers have fallen – down to 100,000 per year in 2021 from 180,000 in 2006 – the recovery of stolen vehicles has dropped considerably, falling from 80 per cent in 2006 to just 28% in 2021.
In addition, the estimated average cost of these stolen vehicles has jumped from £10,000 in 2006 to £20,000 in 2021, with insurers having to pay out more as a result. In total, the estimated yearly cost to insurers is £1.44bn.
Philip Swift, CMA’s managing director, said: “It is way too simplistic to say car crime is down from 500,000 offences in the mid-1990s to 100,000 today so we’ve largely solved it. Even from 180,000 a year in 2006, when the Home Office stopped publishing the annual car theft index, the picture has changed dramatically.
“15-odd years ago, the typical theft was an old Ford Escort worth less than £5k taken for ‘joyriding’ and later recovered, often burnt-out. Now, we commonly see nearly new Range Rovers worth £100k stolen by professional criminals, and they’re seldom found.”
Swift added that the chance of people being reunited with their cars after a theft was ‘becoming ever less likely’, while the current outlook for insurers is ‘significantly worse than a decade ago’.
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