Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill
Friday 2nd December 2022
(2 years ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.
Before I begin, while I have no direct or technical interest to declare, for the sake of transparency, I should bring the House’s attention to the fact that my in-laws are farmers and that we have agricultural equipment in the family, including quad bikes.
Fighting crime has been a priority for me throughout my political career. Some moons ago, I spent eight years as a councillor in a London borough where I was the portfolio holder for community safety. Working closely with the police, we reduced crime in that borough by a quarter, which showed me that, sometimes, simple ideas can make a huge difference to people’s lives in reducing their chances of being a victim of crime and deterring criminals from committing offences in the first place.
The Bill has been on something of a long and winding road from the base ideas that formed it, including the idea to shut down the resale of stolen power tools on online platforms that formed the basis of my 2021 ten-minute rule Bill, which was born on a community Facebook forum in the town of Buckingham in my constituency. That long and winding road has involved extensive negotiation with industry, insurers, the police, representative bodies such as the National Farmers Union, the Country Land and Business Association, the Countryside Alliance and others as well as, of course, the Government, to get to the plan before us. The framework started with a focus on combating thefts of equipment stolen far too often across rural communities, but is expanded in the Bill, having proven that the concept works on quads, all-terrain vehicles and side-by-sides, to other agricultural equipment such as tractor GPS units and way beyond. I sincerely hope that, once we have proved the Bill’s concept, that expansion can take place not just to further agricultural equipment but to equipment in other trades and industries.
More than 40 years ago, a significant change took place in UK farming, which transformed the way in which many farmers operate. The piece of machinery that precipitated that transformation has now become as synonymous with sheep farming as the sheepdog. That revolution in farming methods was brought about by the introduction of ATVs, which were originally three-wheel motorcycles, but are now most commonly four-wheel quad bikes. By allowing farmers to reach significantly larger geographical areas and previously impenetrable rough terrain, their impact on farming has been considerable. They are now a crucial element of livestock farming. However, the versatility of ATVs has meant that they have also become an essential piece of machinery in moorland management, urban parks and beaches, and even to spray weeds and clear snow off our streets in urban and rural environments alike.
Those machines also play fundamental roles in our military, emergency services, and mountain rescue teams across the country carrying out essential functions. They are not designed for fun—although of course there are leisure uses for them, too—but, like most other motorcycles or off-road vehicles, they really are workhorses for so many. On many farms, particularly around lambing time, they are in near constant use. They not only lighten the load of day-to-day activities but play an essential role in ensuring the wellbeing and protection of livestock, which is fundamental to the livelihood of so many farmers, land managers and their families.
Without all-terrain vehicles, many farms would simply not be able to meet the demands of caring for livestock over large geographic areas, which would have previously necessitated the employment of far larger numbers of people at a greater cost to the farmer and to the viability of the farm. In fact, they are so integral to contemporary farming businesses that many farmers choose to operate multiple ATVs, because being left without a machine in the event of a breakdown or theft is unthinkable.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that this is an excellent Bill to help to support farming and farming communities at this time? I congratulate him on bringing forward such a Bill.
Greg Smith
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for what was quite an easy intervention because I am happy to agree with her. The Bill will make a huge difference to farmers and all businesses that use quad bikes as part of their day-to-day operations.
There is a difficult truth, which is why I felt it so important to bring the Bill before the House. The universal trend for all-terrain vehicle thefts in the United Kingdom has amounted to between 800 and 1,100 thefts per year for the last decade. I was informed only this morning that a search on the police national computer shows that we are already up to 800 such reported thefts this year alone, so the trend is not declining.
In the 43 years since their introduction, ATV technology has developed significantly. From the early three-wheel models that had only very basic handlebar controls and had to be kickstarted, modern machines are almost unrecognisable. Today’s ATVs are much more advanced and incorporate features such as four-wheel-drive, tank tracks, cabs, heaters, winches, power steering, electric start buttons and LED lights. Modern ATVs are, in short, infinitely more sophisticated than their predecessors. That is perhaps appropriate, given that they now have a market value of between £7,000 and £20,000, each.
Sir Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con)
My hon. Friend has run through the list of advances that we now see on ATVs. Can he tell the House why manufacturers have not added to that list by fitting immobilisers, which would remove the need for this legislation?
Greg Smith
It is almost as if my right hon. Friend read my mind, because the very next part of my speech is to say that, despite all those advances and everything else that is offered on modern ATVs, there has not been development of safety and security features that prevent theft, such as immobilisers. Those are a very basic security feature; it is almost unfathomable given that most manufacturers of quads and ATVs tend to make other equipment—motorcycles or construction equipment —that are fitted with immobilisers and other security equipment. It is striking to me, and has been somewhat surprising the more I have researched it, that the rollout of these security features has been so slow that some leading manufacturers have used the very same basic key system for 35 years.
Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
It is easy to say that the best security advice for farmers and ATV owners is to take the key out, but when I was farming, every key seemed to fit every vehicle. When I went home at the end of the day, I would take my key home; it did not matter which tractor I would be driving the next morning, because I knew the key would fit.
Greg Smith
My hon. Friend is quite right. Indeed, a lot of the quad bikes and ATVs out there have ignition systems so basic that in some cases people do not even need the key; they can simply start them with a screwdriver or another piece of flat metal. That should really disturb us. We should shine a spotlight on why such equipment can be started in that way.
James Grundy (Leigh) (Con)
I declare an interest: I live on the Grundy family farm, and although we do not have an ATV, the subject is obviously of interest to my family and my wider family. Does my hon. Friend agree that in many ways these issues make farms and other rural businesses more vulnerable than others? That is why legislation such as his Bill is so necessary.
Greg Smith
My hon. Friend hits the nail on the head. With the scale of the theft of quad bikes, ATVs and side-by-sides, we have come to the point where the legislation is simply necessary. With those numbers—800 to 1,100 per year are stolen—something has to give. Farmers, land managers and those who use a quad bike in their businesses need the security of knowing that, when they lock it up in the barn, or wherever they keep it at night, there is a greater chance that it will still be there the next morning. The Bill is not a magic bullet—it will not simply end the theft of all quad bikes and ATVs—but it addresses practical measures such as immobilisers and forensic marking, to ensure a greater chance of equipment and machinery remaining with their owner and shut down the incentives for would-be thieves to steal them.
Ben Everitt
The frustrating thing is that the technology is here. Millions of dollars’ worth of John Deere machinery stolen by Russian Federation forces from a dealership in Ukraine was subsequently shut down remotely by John Deere. Will my hon. Friend join me in commending John Deere for its use of technology to stop that theft of agricultural equipment by the Russian state?
Greg Smith
I absolutely join my hon. Friend in commending John Deere and all manufacturers that put the effort into research and development and into providing such products. Higher-value pieces of agricultural machinery—the tractors, the combines, the sprayers—can be fitted with remote control to shut them down and stop them being used. The Bill focuses on smaller agricultural equipment, but there is no reason why we should stop at that. The more the industry can develop such technologies, the better. If our mobile phones or iPads can be remotely wiped and turned off if someone steals them, so that they cannot be used and the data cannot be extracted, there is no reason why equipment used on farms and on land cannot be treated similarly.
To get back to the central point, when property is stolen it is a nightmare for police and law enforcement to track it and return it to its rightful owner. When the police are called to track down and apprehend a suspect who may have stolen a quad bike or other agricultural equipment from a farm, it really is a race against time. Vehicles such as quads and ATVs are light and easily transportable: within hours, thieves can have them strapped to the back of trailers and towed hundreds of miles from their owners, sometimes heading for seaports where they can be transported to and through any number of countries. By that point, it is simply too late for either the police or the owner to recover the vehicle. That leaves the farmer or landowner with a hefty bill for replacing the whole thing, and productivity lost as a result of no longer having access to such a vital piece of machinery for their business.
On the other side of the same coin, shipping delays, the effects of the covid pandemic and other global factors are contributing to a rise in demand for both new and second-hand farm machinery. As waiting lists grow and market values soar, I am afraid to say that thieves are seeing quads and ATVs as easily portable hot-ticket items.
James Grundy
Does not my hon. Friend further agree that this plague of thefts, due to the ease of making such thefts, is having a considerable impact on insurance for farmers and other rural businesses? Given the current financial circumstances, that is obviously making it very difficult for the more marginal farms to continue.
Greg Smith
I absolutely agree. I have worked closely particularly with NFU Mutual in the preparation of this Bill. It is clear that, if these provisions are adopted and the Bill becomes an Act, having new quads and ATVs both immobilised and fitted with forensic marking should—of course, the market will always dictate this, but, in theory—massively bring down insurance premiums. Any slight increase in the cost of the machine to fit the immobiliser and install the forensic marking equipment should be far more than offset by the reduction in the insurance premium.
Jane Hunt
Does my hon. Friend agree that the current lack of security and safety measures here is almost a criminal waste of police time? Police still have to deal with the crime, try to identify the perpetrators and so on, yet they are not being helped by the manufacturer of the product.
Greg Smith
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend’s analysis. The police are having to spend an inordinate amount of time simply trying to identify stolen pieces of equipment, such as a quad bike, if they find them. It is not uncommon for serial numbers or chassis numbers to be ground off, making the stolen items almost unidentifiable as to where they came from and were originally manufactured and who they were stolen from or, indeed, bought by. Some of the provisions I will outline, particularly forensic marking, will go some way to massively cutting that demand on police time, enabling our fantastic police officers across the whole country to more readily identify stolen property and return it to its rightful owners, as well as prosecuting the criminals who stole it in the first place.
James Grundy
Further to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt), is it not correct that, further to the issues we have discussed with the police, many police forces are simply ill-equipped to deal with rural crime, making it even more difficult to deal with these issues once such thefts have taken place?
Greg Smith
My hon. Friend makes a valid point. Some police forces around the country have put in place robust measures, such as my home police force area, Thames Valley. The force has a new rural crimes taskforce that is very much focused on these issues and ensures that officers have the training to understand all forms of rural crime, including hare coursing, and particular elements of agricultural machinery. If someone has never worked on a farm or lived in a rural community, they would not necessarily immediately get what the machinery is on site.
The establishment of rural crimes units in different police forces is a welcome addition to the response to rural crime. It is something that needs to be rolled out across the whole country, because pretty much everywhere has a rural part to it. We need to ensure that, of the additional 20,000 officers this Government are recruiting and providing to our police force, some of that resource goes into fighting rural crime.
Greg Smith
As my hon. Friend is my constituent, I will give way to him one last time.
Ben Everitt
My hon. Friend is very generous. I know he wants to make progress, but will he join me in commending Thames Valley police’s rural crimes taskforce? It has made fantastic progress in tackling rural crime—not just theft of farm machinery, although a significant amount of stolen farm machinery has been recovered by Thames Valley this year, but things such as hare coursing, which is such a blight and such a pain for farmers. It is another one of those complete time hoovers that sucks up time and attention on farms when we should be focusing on productivity.
Greg Smith
I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend on that. Thames Valley covers both my constituency and his, and, as I said a few moments ago, the taskforce is making great strides to tackle rural crime, under the wonderful leadership of Inspector Stuart Hutchings, “The Mighty Hutch”. He is doing incredible work to ensure that those who wish to commit crimes in rural Buckinghamshire, and indeed rural Milton Keynes, are held to account, apprehended and prosecuted, and that stolen equipment is returned to its rightful owners.
Greg Smith
I will give way to my right hon. Friend in a few moments, once I have made a little more progress.
This Bill will tackle the problems we have just outlined head-on. As I alluded to in response to a number of interventions, it mandates the fitting of forensic markings at source, which feed into a national database accessible to all police forces across the country. There are many manufacturers, and different standards and options out there, but the quads, ATVs and side-by-sides fitted with this forensic marking will be almost as unique as our own DNA; this will make them entirely traceable and identifiable to the police officers who have the scanning equipment to be able to read and understand that forensic marking. That will streamline the ability of each force involved to work with the same resources, simultaneously, thus massively increasing the opportunity to apprehend the suspect, and identify and return the stolen machine to its owner.
Let me turn to the other key change that this Bill makes, which has also been alluded to in answer to some of the earlier interventions. The Bill mandates the fitting of an immobiliser. For more than 20 years, immobilisers have been mandatory for all new passenger cars sold in the UK—that has been the case since October 1998. I dare say that none of us in this place, or indeed outside it, can imagine buying a car, truck or van that did not have an immobiliser, and for good reason: immobilisers are fundamental in preventing vehicle theft. Without the ignition system talking to the engine, there is simply no way that a car can be operated under its own power. Yet despite the many functions of both quad bikes and ATVs, that rule does not currently apply to either, and I put it to the House that that is simply preposterous. Something as simple and easy to fit as an immobiliser is a no-brainer in the case of such essential and valuable assets to our farmers.
This is not an isolated problem; farms of all types across the UK are impacted by vehicle theft, as are the surrounding communities. We are often talking about small communities where everyone knows each other. Farms are the beating heart of rural life, and news of any and all threats they face spreads quickly, and a sense of fear and panic sets in for residents and businesses in the whole area. Rural communities have suffered immeasurably, both during the pandemic and since. Rural businesses teetered on the edge throughout covid, and they continue to feel the effects from that extremely difficult period. When combined with the theft of farm vehicles and equipment, this situation cannot be ignored and must be taken seriously. As the chairman of NFU Mutual, Jim McLaren, has made clear:
“With diesel and fertiliser prices soaring and the cost of living crisis biting, it looks likely that we will see rural crime rise in the coming months.
Current supply chain shortages mean farmers who suffer a theft are facing delays sourcing replacement equipment which may be vital to carrying out essential farm work.”
We are in a race against time to stop farms and farmers not only facing a rise in rural crime, but dealing with the impact of those crimes, potentially and needlessly prolonging the effects on their businesses for months or even years to come. Farmers deserve as much as anyone else to operate in a safe and secure environment. That means getting ahead of the criminal gangs who are perpetrating thefts of these vehicles, and this Bill, I hope, provides a solid foundation on which to pursue them.
The Countryside Alliance, with which I have worked closely on this Bill, revealed through its 2021 rural crime survey that 95% of respondents believe that crime in their local community had become significant over the preceding 12 months. Seventy per cent. believe that there has been an increase in the local crime rate. It is clear how this worrying trend is manifesting itself, with 43% of respondents reporting having a crime committed against them over that period, and 32% of respondents saying that that took the form of agricultural machinery theft.
When we look across the whole country, I can understand how some might say that, in the grand scheme of things, those numbers are not so high, but I say that they are high. Indeed, they are too high, and they need to be tackled. Behind every victim of crime, and more specifically every theft, there lies a business and a family who are dependent on that enterprise for their own financial security. It is a business that can no longer function as it should because that piece of equipment, whether it be large or small, is likely gone forever as it cannot be tracked or retrieved in good time.
Digging deeper into the feedback from rural communities reveals the urgent need for measures specified in the Bill. Looking back to that same rural crime survey, 53% of respondents said that they had installed crime prevention measures in the past 12 months due to an increased fear of crime and directly being victims of crime. These measures include security lighting, industrial barn doors, securing keys and installing CCTV systems. Each of those comes at great cost to the farmers—to those businesses. The measures that we are seeing in farms in rural communities across our country are more typical of an industrial estate in a built-up urban area.
Sir Greg Knight
I am obliged to my hon. Friend for giving way. Just going back to his earlier comments about rural crime, is it still not the case that, sadly, suspects are 25% more likely to be arrested for crimes committed in urban areas than those committed in the countryside?
Greg Smith
My right hon. Friend makes a valid point, and it is something that the rural crime taskforce in my police force area, Thames Valley, and the rural crime units in other police forces, are taking seriously and are trying to get on top of. The statistics speak for themselves. The Bill is a part of the jigsaw puzzle in starting to tackle rural crime. It ensures that, where they cover rural areas, our police forces have the powers, the facilities and the equipment themselves—for example, the scanning equipment for forensic marking—to identify stolen equipment and return it to its rightful owners. These powers will give our police forces greater confidence that they can get on top of rural crime, by identifying stolen equipment, identifying who has stolen it and bringing them to justice.
The Bill, as I said earlier, is no magic bullet; it will not end rural crime overnight. However, it does introduce significant duties for the manufacturers and those who sell this equipment, to help to lift the burden on our farmers of installing all that expensive security equipment and of essentially having to turn their premises—the beating heart of the countryside—into exclusion zones. I am not saying that that other security equipment is not needed—of course it is; every little bit helps—but we must acknowledge as a country that farms being turned into mini-fortresses is not befitting to the countryside, and we need to take other measures, too.
Ben Everitt
That is an important point, and I hope my hon. Friend will agree that people who are not from rural communities need to understand how food is produced. If as a nation we are to make the transition to producing, growing and selling our food much more sustainably, the public need to see the process. Turning farms into fortresses is counter to that. Does he agree that we need more accessibility and less security if we are to get more people on farms?
Greg Smith
I am grateful to my hon. Friend. He and I share a passion for farming and ensuring that farming is visible and accessible to everyone in our country. He makes an important point about people understanding how food is produced—that the chicken does not get into the plastic box on the shelves in the supermarket by magic and that the cereal does not make itself in a factory, but has to be grown somewhere first. He almost tempts me to get into the amendment I have tabled to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, but I will leave that for when it comes back on Report—as I hear my hon. Friend the Whip encouraging me to do.
Coming back to the subject at hand, pre-fitting quad bikes and ATVs with the means necessary both to prevent them from being stolen and to effectively track any that are stolen will lift a huge weight off the shoulders of our hard-working farmers. The threat is well documented, and it is more widespread and organised than most think. We are not necessarily talking about a couple of opportunists who are bored and looking for something to fill their time; those who are stealing this equipment are predominantly organised criminal syndicates intent on profiteering from high-value theft.
Let me give the House an example. A prominent recent case of agricultural equipment theft saw the successful prosecution of two men for conspiring to steal agricultural global positioning systems and other technical equipment valued at approximately £380,000 from agricultural vehicles on 13 farms and estates across the county of Essex between 28 September and 27 October 2021. Following investigations by Essex police, they were convicted and sentenced to a total of six years and 10 months in prison.
This Bill will prevent the need to pursue this time-consuming and extremely costly legal process by ensuring that the quads and ATVs, and potentially further equipment in due time through secondary legislation, either cannot be stolen in the first place or, through forensic marking, are made less attractive to the would-be thieves. That case took Essex police a considerable amount of time, a lot of investigation and probably hundreds, if not thousands of hours of police time to get that fantastic prosecution. This Bill is about short-cutting that process for our police and ensuring they can get the result and get justice in much faster time.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) mentioned, Thames Valley police, my own local force and his, reported recently that officers from its groundbreaking rural crime taskforce, which I referred to earlier and which has only been in operation since April this year, has recovered more than 100 items totalling more than £1 million-worth of machinery, tools and equipment, 25% of which were related to theft. Those are investigations resulting in a positive outcome for the victim. That is encouraging and a great start, but we need to go much further and expand that excellent work beyond the individual forces. I am pleased to say that there is already strong engagement on this from both rural representative groups and local law enforcement, but we need to go further by tackling the problem at source.
A good example of the behind-the-scenes work already being done to tackle that type of rural crime is NFU Mutual’s approach, which is based on close co-ordination with national and local police forces, as well as with the manufacturing sector. The dedicated agricultural vehicle theft unit at the national vehicle crime intelligence service saw £2.6 million-worth of stolen machinery recovered in 2021, up from £2.3 million in 2020. Specific measures, such as the funding of CESAR—the construction and agricultural equipment security and registration scheme—forensic markings for 200 quads in Northern Ireland through working with Datatag and the Police Service of Northern Ireland, have contributed to a drop of nearly 20% in the cost of dealing with rural theft in Northern Ireland. Of course, other forensic-marking products and brands are available.
We need to lock in reductions, such as those of that Northern Ireland project, for the whole of our United Kingdom, and for every farm, because each suffers from the same threat. The Bill will provide the groundwork to bring down rates of theft and reduce the overall threat of theft, tackling the problem at source and building on the prevention measures that are already in place.
The cost of not doing that is clear. The CLA estimates that the average financial impact on the victim per rural crime equates to £4,800, and that figure increases each day as supply chain costs and overheads continue to rise. The value of quad bike and ATV thefts reported to NFU Mutual in 2021 was £2.2 million. Almost half those reports were received between September and December, demonstrating the extremely challenging circumstances that we are dealing with and how much is at stake for farmers as the weather begins to turn.
For the 10.3 million people who live in the countryside, this hits right at the heart of everyday life. Rural crime cannot simply sit alongside urban crime, as the CLA makes clear. Difficulties in tracking criminals over such vast swathes of countryside mean that local police forces are always faced with a uphill battle—they have to spread resources over a much larger geographical area compared with their more urban counterparts—and criminals already have a head start.
Simon Baynes (Clwyd South) (Con)
My hon. Friend is making an absolutely vital point. I live close to the Ceiriog valley in my constituency of Clwyd South, where there have been a lot of problems of this nature. Often, thieves come from outside the constituency. They do not come from a rural area but, in this case, from Liverpool, Manchester or Birmingham, so they are not known to the police and so on, which makes apprehending them all the more difficult. I strongly support everything he is saying.
Greg Smith
I am grateful for my hon. Friend’s support for the Bill. I agree on apprehending criminals and local knowledge. The evidence shows that so much of this acquisitive crime is committed by criminals who are not local to the area in which they are committing the crime. They are passing through as an organised criminal gang, which adds to the pressures on our police in apprehending them.
Close collaboration between communities and the police is also key to tackling theft, as demonstrated by the agricultural and construction equipment police unit, which, since April last year, has been central to tackling the cross-border organised crime that my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes) rightly highlighted. Its guiding principle is one that goes right to the heart of the Bill: cross-industry co-operation is crucial for crime prevention, and prevention is fundamentally better than the cure. Just as the vehicles themselves are important to farmers, so intelligence-sharing is essential for tackling theft. That is what the Bill enables.
Dealerships would be required by law to submit details of a vehicle’s appearance and registration and the location of its forensic marking to a central database that is accessible to all police forces right across our United Kingdom, no matter their size or scope. This would better enable officers from different forces to work together within dedicated units and apprehend the assailant in an effective and timely manner. That is an essential tool not only for police forces today, but for tomorrow and far into the future as the technology evolves and is developed further.
The use of a national database for training new officers is crucial for making the most of this opportunity, because by using and sharing data, forces can pinpoint hotspots where theft is particularly prevalent and respond accordingly in a co-ordinated way, knowing that their officers are properly trained to use and interpret those information systems. That is essential to beat the ever-changing tactics that these criminal gangs use to pursue what is becoming an increasingly sophisticated operation. They have the upper hand in more rural areas. Without the same level of CCTV and automatic number plate recognition systems in place, it can be incredibly difficult to track stolen vehicles moving through rural areas, especially under the cover of darkness. That is why the behind-the-scenes work already being rolled out not only needs to be accelerated, but formalised, and that is what the Bill does.
Before I conclude, I want to place on record some particular thanks to everyone who has worked with me and my team on this Bill. That is above all, but certainly not limited to, David Exwood and his whole team at the National Farmers Union and everyone at NFU Mutual who deals with this issue day in, day out for its thousands of members and consumers across the UK. Likewise, the Bill would not exist without the vast insight, knowledge and experience of Superintendent Andy Huddleston, whose hard work and determination as the rural crime co-ordinator at the National Police Chiefs’ Council has made this Bill possible. I also thank the many other industry-led organisations that have contributed to the preparation and research for the Bill, including the Country Land and Business Association, the Countryside Alliance, the Construction Equipment Association and the Agricultural Equipment Association among others. For his huge dedication and hard work supporting me on this Bill, I thank my senior parliamentary assistant, Ian Kelly.
It would also be remiss of me not to thank the succession of Ministers with whom I have negotiated since I came out of the ballot earlier this year, not least my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp) on the Treasury Bench, who alongside his hard-working and dedicated officials has made himself and them available to me frequently throughout the drafting and production of the Bill, which I hope will lead to the Government’s full support for it as it passes through Parliament.
The Bill will allow my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary and future Home Secretaries to expand its scope where necessary and ensure that rural communities remain protected as the threat evolves and changes. The demand is still there for globalised criminal networks of stolen equipment and machinery, and we must continue working to break that link and to shut it down at source. That means identifying and monitoring other such industries that are vulnerable to having similar types of valuable assets stolen at large. There is just as much a threat to the construction industry and other trades. There are vast amounts of specialist equipment and vehicles found everywhere, from driveways to building sites, containing everything from power tools to excavators, all of which are at risk of being stolen. Tackling it will require a cross-departmental effort, just as it requires a cross-border and cross-community approach to tackle it on the ground, but we have a starting point.
We simply cannot lose this opportunity to build a network that will ultimately enhance safety and security for countless communities, businesses and farmers across our country. I trust that these calls for a strengthened approach to tackling the scourge of rural crime will not have gone unheard. I urge the Minister to keep monitoring this policy area closely and to continue to work with the police and the farming community. This Bill can make a difference to rural crime, and I commend it to the House.
Ben Everitt (Milton Keynes North) (Con)
Often when I come to the House on a Friday, I look at the Order Paper and do not really have a clear position on a Bill. I sit here and listen to the debate and try to work out what the key points are and what position I am going to take. Happily, this morning I am in no such position; I fully support the Bill presented to the House by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), who I am very pleased to call a friend. I offer him my huge thanks for his work on the Bill, and I extend my thanks to the folk he mentioned, with whom he has worked so hard to bring the Bill to this stage. I know it has been a difficult passage since he came number 4 in the private Member’s Bill ballot.
Ben Everitt
Sorry, I did my hon. Friend a huge disservice. He was number 3 in the private Member’s Bill ballot.
I was going to say that many Members on both sides of the House take rural crime incredibly seriously, but it is disappointing to see the lack of numbers on the Opposition Benches.
Sir Greg Knight
Is my hon. Friend, like me, rather shocked to see the Liberal Democrat Benches completely empty? Clearly, the Liberal Democrats do not care about this matter.
Ben Everitt
That is the point I was stumbling to make, so I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend for his timely intervention. Yes, it is surprising and disappointing.
Rural crime is an incredibly important topic. My constituency contains not only the wonderful top half of Milton Keynes, but two amazing market towns and dozens of villages and farms. It is the interrelationship between the city, towns and farms that really makes our part of England so representative of England as a whole. Being a community is a team game and involves towns, villages and cities, and the interrelationship is really part of that. It is surprising that, apart from the shadow Minister, who is in her place, there are no Opposition Members here to support the Bill.
My family’s farming background makes me acutely aware of the vast range of issues facing our farmers and the agricultural sector at large. Additionally, the correspondence I get, and the visits I make to my constituents in rural areas, show me what a real pain rural crime is, specifically the theft of agricultural machinery, and that is the angle from which I will focus my remarks today.
I have worked on a farm where we have had kit stolen, and it really is so frustrating. In farming, time is money. Harvests are a race against the weather and a race against time. If a farmer does not get their harvest in while the weather is good, they will be getting it in while it is damp. They will not have had the sun dry out their crop, and they will have to spend an absolute fortune drying the grain. With today’s energy prices being so high, that is the difference—
James Grundy
Is it not true to say that the loss of a key piece of equipment during the harvest season is devastating? My hon. Friend has mentioned grain, but an entire crop of hay or straw can be entirely ruined if it is rained on, and it is impossible to get it dry in time.
Ben Everitt
Absolutely. That is entirely the case, and we are talking about food. Our farmers provide food for our nation, and the work that they do is so time critical and time intensive that thefts from farms can totally disrupt that. These small incidents can have a catastrophic effect on profit and loss, and on productivity—basically, on the viability of a farm. It is such an important issue.
One of the frustrating things is that we know that thefts of farm machinery are quite often the result of targeted organised crime. It is not just the horrendous effect on the viability of a farm and the impact on the food chain, prices and so on; it is the fact that farm thefts go on to fund organised crime and all the horrible things that are done, and I will come to that later.
There are concerns that the increase in the cost of living may lead to an uptick in rural crime. Regretfully, compared with other types of crime, rural crimes often go unreported, making it difficult to understand the scale of the threat faced by tradespeople and farmers. This is highlighted by the fact that suspects are nearly 25% more likely to be charged for crimes in urban areas than in the countryside.
My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham mentioned the recent survey which showed that the theft of agricultural machinery is a top priority for people in rural communities. I certainly know that to be true, from talking to my farmers in Milton Keynes North and reading my correspondence on the issue. Furthermore, 32% of respondents to the survey reported experiencing agricultural machinery theft. If we do anything through this debate today, it is to shine a light on the importance of tackling this huge issue for our rural constituents.
Worse still, rural crime is having a significant economic impact. According to NFU Mutual’s recent report, rural theft cost the UK economy £40.5 million in 2020-21. Tractors, combines, drills and cultivators make up the core of a farm’s arsenal for preparing and harvesting the land. As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham said, ATVs provide a vital support role for farmers, with the mobility they provide to move people around and move seed around. Unsurprisingly, these complex and vital pieces of machinery come at a huge cost to farmers, in terms of both the initial purchase price and then the maintenance.
It is not just the bits of kit themselves; it is the technology that goes into them. There is a huge amount of technology poured into farming now. I am of a generation described as being born analogue and being digital immigrants, and that is certainly true of my farming career. I do not recognise the technology picture of an ATV that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham paints, because it was a simpler bit of kit when I was buzzing around the countryside on them. In the late ’90s, I was fortunate enough to work on a farm that was considered to be an early adopter of technology, and I remember fitting a GPS kit to a combine harvester. That GPS kit, we were told, came at a cost of £12,000, which was a lot of money in those days. I remember making sure that we could get the software working and then turning the computer on, making a cup of tea while it booted up, combining the field, avidly watching the GPS as the combine crawled through the field, going back to the office, having our tea, putting the kit away, waiting for the computer, and teasing out what turned out to be three pages of A4 in very scrawly graphs, telling us exactly what we knew already—£4,000 a page.
Technology has moved on a lot since then, and frankly, it is so good and so expensive that it is such a target for thieves. GPS units now are not what I described from the late ’90s. They are incredibly valuable bits of kit and command a high price in the resale market. I happen to know that in my hon. Friend’s constituency of Buckingham, there is a company that is currently testing robot tractors, which is a fantastic innovation and will probably plough fields in neater lines than I used to. We also have ground- penetrating radar, which is a wonderful innovation that allows for the accurate and precise application of pesticides and fertiliser, minimising run-off into the watercourse and supporting our natural environment. Critically, it also makes farming much more efficient so that we can feed our nation.
Without these vital tools, our farmers cannot harvest their crops efficiently or carry on their important work on the land. Now, more than ever, our farmers need the protection they deserve to give them peace of mind and to ensure we maintain food production levels during this testing time, both domestically and, importantly, internationally. Given Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the world is at a critical time for food supply. We will be okay in the UK. We will feed our people because, comparatively, we are a very rich nation but, as the global food supply goes down, we are unfortunately heading for famine.
Time is money, and we need to make sure we do everything we can to support farmers to get the harvest in on time. The theft of larger farming machinery is often carried out by organised crime, by multiple criminals working together. It is therefore time we started treating the security of farming machinery with more importance and focus.
James Grundy
Does my hon. Friend agree that, given the advancement and increasing value of farming equipment, the lack of security features that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) mentioned is akin to leaving a house full of Fabergé eggs unlocked?
Ben Everitt
I totally agree with my hon. Friend. I wonder whether his family’s farm is a Fabergé egg farm, which I suspect might be a profitable agricultural innovation.
The challenge of equipment theft is huge, and we need to prevent not just the theft of equipment but the resale of it, too. These bits of kit are so versatile, particularly the ATVs on which this Bill focuses, that they can be resold to support many different industries and trades. They are versatile, but they are also fun. I confess that, in my earlier years, I perhaps drove an ATV a little faster than recommended, not on the public road, of course. People race these things, so they are genuinely versatile bits of kit.
By preventing the theft and resale of this equipment, which is vital to tradespeople and agricultural businesses, we can deter and reduce theft. Specifically, as my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham mentioned, by mandating and fitting forensic markings and vehicle engine immobilisers, we will set a new standard for security on vehicles manufactured and sold in the United Kingdom.
Sir Greg Knight
On preventing resale, is it not clear that there may have to be a record-keeping requirement on retailers? Sadly, because retailers come and go, the best way for this to be effective is by way of an online database.
Ben Everitt
I wholeheartedly agree with my right hon. Friend. Data is critical to resolving these issues and, in fact, it links directly to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), who said there is a national issue, as these criminal gangs often operate from different sides of the country. The availability of data and the ability to track not only the bits of kit that have been stolen but where they are being resold, and by which channels they are being resold, will be critical to solving this.
The requirement to fit new agricultural machinery with visible engine immobilisers is key, because we need to ensure that criminals can see that they will be caught. It will prevent vehicles from running under their own propulsion, and, obviously, it will make it very difficult for criminals to steal them. I mentioned earlier the John Deere kit that was shut down remotely by the company after being taken by the Russian forces in Ukraine. That is a very effective way of removing the resale value of stolen goods.
Perhaps most significantly, the Bill will require the recording of sales data, which, of course, includes the vehicle registration. The police will then be able to track stolen vehicles more easily once the theft has been reported. The idea is that criminals can be apprehended before arranging the transport of the vehicles. They are often transported abroad, so it is not just an organised crime in the UK, but an organised crime issue around the world. The Bill’s core aim is to design out crime, protecting our farmers and tradespeople and making the jobs of our police forces much easier.
More locally, I join my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham in welcoming the launch of the Thames Valley police rural crime taskforce earlier this year, which has already had a positive impact on the whole region. So far, £1 million-worth of equipment has been recovered by the taskforce, and last summer it recovered a machine worth £250,000 from a quarry in Buckinghamshire. Critically, the vehicle identification number plate had been removed by the criminals, the only remaining identifying feature being a 3-digit VIN. Alarmingly, that number was not registered on any database—which is relevant to the point made earlier by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight).
This case highlights two issues clearly—the first being that existing vehicles are not fitted with enough security features, and the second being that expensive vehicles are often difficult to identify and track, which makes it less likely that criminals can be apprehended and the stolen vehicle can be returned to its owner. As I have already explained in detail, I am confident that the Bill will enable us to make significant progress towards tackling both issues head-on. For example, an engine mobiliser might have prevented that vehicle from being stolen in the first place.
I also believe that the Bill will enable us to make significant progress towards reducing rural crime and protecting farmers, but there is still more to be done. We need to find ways to engage with manufacturers on the issue of designing security into their tools and vehicles, because criminals will always find new ways of adapting to new security features, and we need to encourage farmers and agriculture businesses to up their security. As was pointed out earlier, it is important for farms to be accessible, but they must also be secure. The focus of the Bill is right: it is not about turning farms into fortresses, but about holding manufacturers to account, and to high standards, when it comes to security.
The Bill puts us on the right path, a path on which security becomes a bigger factor in the way in which equipment for tradespeople and agricultural businesses are designed. Ultimately, these vital pieces of equipment are inextricably linked to the functioning of our economy and our food security. Through the Bill we can show our support for the farmers and tradespeople of this country, who play a critical role in our economy— especially now, given the rising cost of living.
I am pleased to support the Bill today, and I hope that Members on both sides of the House will do so as well.
Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)
It is a genuine pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), who has shared some of his insight and expertise, having clearly spent a great deal of time working on a farm in a previous life—I am curious about the notion of Fabergé egg farms and the potential for expansion there. In all sincerity, I congratulate the hon. Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on bringing forward this private Member’s Bill and on comprehensively and convincingly setting out the case for it today.
Having considered the hon. Gentleman’s Bill and having listened carefully to his arguments, the Opposition are inclined to agree that his proposals would have a strong impact on mitigating against quad bike and all-terrain vehicle theft. That form of criminality has blighted rural and more urban communities for too long, either because of the initial theft or the illicit and antisocial use of such vehicles thereafter in constituencies across the UK.
As outlined, the Bill seeks to mandate the fitting of forensic markings and an immobiliser on all quad bikes and all-terrain vehicles sold in the UK, which would solve a specific problem. If enacted, the Bill provides the scope for those measures to be expanded further. It would be a welcome tool to support the police in deterring such thefts, finding stolen goods and supporting agricultural and land workers who need that kit to do their jobs and undertake the incredibly valued work that has been discussed.
Rural crime has been a priority. My hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones), who is a fellow shadow Home Affairs Minister with responsibility for policing, has visited a number of rural crime initiatives, such as Operation Hawkeye in Northumberland, where efforts to disrupt poaching recovered £850,000-worth of property and arrested 65 people. From my experience of my Halifax constituency, which takes in urban and rural areas, quad bike and all-terrain vehicle theft and subsequent misuse is a massive and sustained challenge.
Last month, I was frustrated to hear that Todmorden junior football club, just down the Calder valley, was subject to a serious act of vandalism. One of its pitches was left badly scarred and unplayable by someone repeatedly driving a quad bike over it. Louise Leeming, the club’s welfare officer, said:
“They’ve completely trashed it, you can’t play on it. The council spent an absolute fortune repairing it and they”—
the vandals—
have just destroyed it.”
At a time when council funding is, frankly, being decimated, it is reprehensible that an individual would flagrantly seek to damage a much-needed facility for local children.
That is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Locally, in October, as part of Operation Heelfield, officers executed a section 26 warrant to arrest a Halifax man on suspicion of burglary after a recently stolen Yamaha Kodiak quad bike was found in his garage. In March, two quad bikes were seized by police after two males, who had been involved in using them antisocially, had abandoned them. That formed part of Operation Hedgeson, which was carried out by the Halifax neighbourhood policing team to pursue, catch and convict those responsible for causing a nuisance in our communities through their antisocial and dangerous behaviour on and off the roads with such quad bikes and ATVs.
Unfortunately, such stories are not surprising and occur far too often. According to statistics released by NFU Mutual, in 2021, West Yorkshire had the third-largest number of quad bike thefts in the country. As the hon. Gentleman said, estimates suggest that nationwide, between 900 and 1,200 quad bikes are stolen every year, and many end up circulating back on to the market in some way. An NFU Mutual crime report estimated that in 2021, rural theft cost the UK £40.5 million.
I am sure that hon. Members will join me in paying tribute to our local policing teams, who work incredibly hard to try to get ahead of the criminals in getting a grip on and tackling this problem, but they simply do not have the requisite resources or toolkit to completely clamp down on such crime. The Bill, if introduced, would be a formidable starting point, but there are no two ways about it: the underfunding and under-resourcing of our police forces have undermined their capabilities for more than a decade. Analysis carried out by the Labour party, which studied the budgets of all 43 police forces in England and Wales, found that, in 2021, police budgets were £1.6 billion down in real terms on when the Conservatives came to power in 2010. In August this year, the National Police Chiefs’ Council said in a statement that crime detection and charge rates had dropped following austerity measures and a fall in police numbers since 2010. Its spokesperson said:
“Detection and charge rates for a range of crimes have fallen over the past five years.”
The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)
The shadow Minister is talking about policing figures and theft. Would she like to join me in welcoming the fact that, since March 2010—when Labour left office—theft figures have fallen by 46%, according to the crime survey for England and Wales, from 4.99 million theft offences to 2.69 million?
Holly Lynch
I would be really interested to see the details of those figures. I am sorry to say that detection rates, charge rates and prosecution rates are all going in the wrong direction under this Government. I gave a quote from the National Police Chiefs’ Council. If the Minister wants to take that up with the council, he can certainly do that. Its spokesperson said:
“Detection and charge rates for a range of crimes have fallen over the past five years…This has been impacted by austerity and the loss of thousands of police officers and staff, increasing complexity of policing and crime, growing demand related to mental ill health and impact of backlogs in the court system.”
Chris Philp
I am grateful to the shadow Minister for giving way again. I suppose she will not get many interventions from her own side, looking at the empty Opposition Benches, so I am happy to fill the gap. She mentioned police officer numbers. Would she like to join me in welcoming the fact that, come March next year—just four months’ time—when the police uplift programme is completed and 20,000 extra officers have been recruited, we will have about 149,000 police officers, which is more than at any time in the country’s history?
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)
Order. Can I just ensure that colleagues know it is important to address the Bill and not go too much wider?
Holly Lynch
I will get back to the detail of the Bill, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I quickly make the point that the Government cut 21,000 police officers. I will not be giving them a pat on the back for replacing 20,000, having recognised the detrimental impact that has had on the safety of our communities. Those pressures hit rural communities particularly hard. Interestingly, just last month, BBC analysis found that suspects are almost 25% more likely to be charged for crimes in urban areas than in the countryside. In 2021, there was a charge rate of 6.89% in rural areas compared with 8.55% in urban areas. I am sure that the policing Minister will want to have a close look at that stark difference.
I return to the detail of the Bill. I particularly welcome its provision to allow, through secondary legislation, the Secretary of State the power to expand the remit of the Bill’s requirements to other types of equipment and machinery commonly used in the agricultural and construction sectors. We hope that, if enacted, secondary legislation will expand the Bill to cover a multitude of other agricultural and construction equipment. I know that chainsaws and nail guns are the types of tools and kit that are too regularly stolen from properties, or the backs of vans and other vehicles, costing hundreds of thousands of pounds each year.
Given the expertise of the hon. Member for Buckingham in this area and his contributions on the topic in the Chamber today and previously, I know that he is all too aware of the problem of theft from vans. According to research carried out by Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, in 2021, 27% of van drivers had fallen victim to tool theft in the previous 12 months. The total cost of all lost tools and equipment is estimated to be about £15 million a year. Volkswagen estimates that the associated downtime for drivers who must replace those tools costs £550 a day per van. The Bill presents an opportunity to sharpen the tools available in the fight against this type of crime. When resources are down and geographically stretched in some rural areas, the more we can use technology to design out crime, the better.
We are satisfied that the Bill will make some progress towards that, helping to suppress theft and the antisocial use of quad bikes that is often a consequence. I again commend the hon. Member for Buckingham. We hope that the Government will allow the Bill to progress to Committee stage where Members can consider the detail, in the hope that it makes a difference when tackling this type of criminality, which blights far too many communities.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
The Countryside Alliance has conducted an annual survey of rural communities’ experiences and perceptions over the last calendar year. The 2021 survey revealed that 43% of respondents reported having had a crime committed against them in the last year. Of those, 32% reported having experienced agricultural theft, which was the third most reported crime. In the 2020 survey, agricultural machinery theft was reported as the respondents’ top priority for police to tackle.
That is what the Bill deals with. However, the issue is much wider. A local farmer in Loughborough has recently been targeted, having had £2,000-worth of GPS equipment stolen from a tractor. He highlighted that it is a common occurrence and that he has already taken extensive security measures on the farm following previous thefts, including locked gates at every entrance, video cameras, motion activation sirens and locks on all sheds. However, unfortunately, often, machinery has to be left in the fields in remote locations during busy times of year, which is when criminals tend to strike. I would therefore be keen for all types of farming equipment to be included in the registration process. He is a farmer I have met on many occasions; he is very hard-working—as are many farmers across the country, but this gentleman works very hard indeed. It is wrong that he should have to think of those things and take all those measures.
The Bill gives the Secretary of State the power to make regulations that require all new all-terrain vehicles and quad bikes to be fitted with immobilisers and forensic markings, and owners’ details to be registered on a database. On the first issue, the National Farmers Union has highlighted that shipping delays and the effects of the covid pandemic and Brexit are contributing to a rise in demand for both new and second-hand farm machinery. NFU members have reported that the lack of availability of ATVs has resulted in it taking three to six months to replace a stolen vehicle, and that the cost has risen dramatically.
As waiting lists grow and market values soar, thieves are seeing quads and ATVs as expensive, easily portable, hot-ticket items with a ready resale market in this country and abroad. Thefts are therefore hitting farmers twice as hard because of the difficulties in getting replacement vehicles. The financial impact of these incidents is exacerbated further at a time when energy and feed costs are soaring. Requiring that new machinery be fitted with a prominent and visible engine immobiliser should provide a deterrent effect by making it harder to steal, thereby decreasing its attractiveness to thieves. That view is supported by the NFU, which has stated that immobilisers and trackers act as a deterrent to thieves, increase the chance of police recovering the vehicle and catching the people behind these crimes, and help farm safety as the immobiliser systems have smart technology that can raise the alarm if a machine has been impacted or rolled over. Although the NFU welcomes the Bill’s ambitions, it argues that its scope should be widened in secondary legislation to include other agricultural equipment.
The second part of the Bill requires that owners’ details be registered on a database. That will make it easier for police to investigate thefts and return stolen goods to their owners. It will also make it easier for legitimate owners to demonstrate their title, in case that is required during an investigation into a suspected theft. That is a positive step, but more needs to be done to prevent tool theft, particularly from vans.
I would be keen to widen the Bill further to include all commercial vehicles and the equipment kept within them. In October, Tradespeople Against Tool Theft published a White Paper exploring the realities of UK tradespeople who have had their tools stolen. The paper found that 78% of tradespeople surveyed had their tools stolen and 38.5% had them stolen from their van outside their home. Only 1% of tradespeople fully recovered their stolen tools. Some trades appear to be more desirable targets for thieves; 30% of carpenters had their tools stolen four times or more.
A highly skilled plumber in my constituency highlighted this issue at a national level a few years ago with his #noVANber campaign:
“Based in Loughborough, independent plumber Peter Booth (@PBPlumber) launched a petition last year aiming to get the issue of van theft taken more seriously. His #noVANber social media campaign calls on the Government to look at the increasing ways to protect tradespeople from van tool theft. A recent report by Powertools2U claimed that a van has its tools stolen every 23 minutes in the UK, with an average of 62 thefts per day.”
Peter Booth added:
“I got tired of seeing photos and stories from tradespeople who had their vans targeted and tools stolen, stopping them from working. I didn’t think it was fair. I wanted to gather support using social media influence to try and get the Government to look at the possible ways to help make this crime less profitable for the culprits.”
The impact of equipment theft on victims can be wide-ranging, including the financial costs and the emotional and psychological impact. Financially, there is not only the cost of replacing the stolen equipment, but the potential loss of business due to the delays in sourcing new tools. The Federation of Master Builders found that over a builder’s career, they will typically lose £10,000-worth of tools and six working days to tool theft. Alongside that, the FMB has reported that tool theft is causing 15% of builders to suffer from anxiety and 11% to suffer from depression. The chief executive of the FMB said:
“Decisive action is needed to tackle tool theft. Eight in ten builders report that they have had tools stolen before. This is causing mental health issues amongst builders with reports of depression, anxiety, anger, frustration, stress and even suicidal thoughts.”
Peter Booth worked on his petition alongside my predecessor, the right hon. Nicky Morgan, now in the other place, and called on the Government to consider what more could be done to tackle van theft and tool theft. The petition stated:
“The loss of a van and/or tools can severely impact on a tradesperson. Even if they are insured, sourcing replacements, organising van repairs and rebooking appointments means significant time out of work. For those who cannot find affordable insurance, this can lead to the loss of livelihood.
While tradespeople can take preventative measures to protect their vans and tools, this only goes so far in deterring thieves. We are, therefore, calling on the Government to consider what more can be done to tackle this problem, whether it be introducing new legislation, additional sentencing guidelines or regulations on the reselling of tools. Ultimately, thieves must understand that such a crime is not profitable and that stealing a livelihood carries with it commensurate penalties.”
It was signed by 40,262 people.
The prominence of the second-hand tool market is helping to drive tool theft, as second-hand tools are more affordable and can be relatively easy to source. The market is also not currently regulated, which means sellers do not have to prove the tools were acquired legally. Research by Direct Line insurance found that nearly one third of people have bought second-hand tools at some point and six in 10 tradespeople have been approached by or have seen someone trying to sell second-hand tools that they suspected were stolen.
In April 2021, my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) introduced a ten-minute rule Bill to require people selling second-hand tools on online marketplaces to reveal a serial number in a searchable format for each item. Making serial numbers, which are unique identifiers, searchable would help to track down stolen goods and hopefully cut off the ability of criminals to monetise their stolen items. This is an excellent idea, as it fits in well with the previous campaign of my constituent Mr Booth. I will be keen to bring these ideas forward during the passage of this Bill, should it go further.
In the meantime, a number of industry stakeholders, including the FMB, have published practical advice for tradespeople to reduce their risk of having tools stolen. An official police security initiative, “Secured By Design”, has also published similar tips to prevent tool and van theft. They include removing tools from vans, installing a tool safe, alarm and new locks, marking tools, and parking strategically. We should encourage tradespeople to follow that advice, but we should not place all the onus on them. The Government have outlined several steps they have undertaken to address the issue of stolen equipment, which include the establishment of an expert stolen goods working group, collaborating with the police and the academic community to tackle the markets for stolen goods. The then Minister of State for the Home Office and Ministry of Justice, my right hon. Friend the Member for North West Hampshire (Kit Malthouse), said:
“The group is examining ways to make property more identifiable and traceable and are working with partners to increase enforcement and encourage due diligence checks by second-hand goods traders.”
The national vehicle crime working group, established by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, is also being used to connect the Government and the police and motor manufacturers. The Government have said that the working group has created a network of vehicle crime specialists across police forces in England and Wales. Their work includes consideration of how to reduce thefts of items from vehicles.
In conclusion, the Bill is a good framework, which will most certainly help farmers and others who have rural business vehicles, but I would like it to go wider to encompass all farm equipment and then to help, defend and support our tradespeople, who are the backbone of our economy and this country. I ask the Minister to look to include those businesses in his plans. This Bill mandates the forensic marking of farm vehicles, which is of equal importance and value to tradespeople. Let us look after those who look after our economy and our country.
Anna Firth (Southend West) (Con)
Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important debate. May I start by congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on bringing this important Bill before the House today? I am delighted to be here on a Friday to support it. It was good to hear the statesmanlike manner in which he spoke on this important subject of equipment theft. It is clearly an issue that is extremely important to his rural constituents in Buckingham, and he represented them with expertise, experience, authority and understanding. Theft of equipment is also a pressing issue in my constituency, so my constituents will also be grateful to him for bringing this Bill to the House today.
The Bill seeks to prevent the theft and re-sale of equipment and tools used by tradesmen, including those in the agricultural and building trades. It is such an important and groundbreaking Bill that I would like to deal with it clause by clause. Clause 1 specifies that vehicles such as quadbikes and ATVs primarily designed for use by farmers must be fitted with an engine immobiliser. It also sets out a requirement for equipment to be marked with a unique identifier, which must be able to be easily seen and is permanent. So the clause sets up a system that is the same as the VIN system we have in cars.
Clause 2 sets out a requirement that there should be a permanent record of the details of the buyer of the equipment. That could include their name, address, phone number and email, as well as the make, model and colour of the equipment in question.
Sir Greg Knight
Does my hon. Friend agree with the comment I made earlier about the importance of ensuring through the record-keeping provision that records are not lost if, for example, a vendor goes out of business? I believe it is essential that any records be kept online.
Anna Firth
My right hon. Friend makes a crucial point. The whole point of the system is that we are setting up a permanent record. If the record is to be permanent, it must be accessible and held in such a way that people’s records are not lost. In this day and age, clearly the only way is to have a proper online database.
The permanent record will also include a unique identifying number for pieces of equipment, as we have discussed in reference to clause 1. Making sure that specific pieces of farm equipment are clearly linked to a specific person or owner will ensure that when the time comes for resale, a potential buyer will be able to take the details of the person selling the equipment and check the identifying mark against the permanent record on the computer database that has been established. If they match, all is well and the buyer can carry on with the purchase; if not, that is a clear flag that the piece of equipment could be stolen and the buyer should steer well clear.
Clause 3 is equally important. It will set up an enforcement mechanism and put proper measures in place so that police and other enforcement agencies can ensure compliance with clauses 1 and 2.
By making equipment more identifiable, both physically and on the online database, we will be able to detect stolen equipment more quickly. That in turn will reduce theft because the resale market will be permanently disrupted. For those reasons, I believe that the Bill is incredibly worth while and will give huge peace of mind to our hard-working tradesmen and women all around the country. That is why the Bill has been welcomed by such a diverse cross-section of business representatives: the Countryside Alliance, which represents people throughout our rural communities, says that it “fully supports this Bill”, while the insurance company Simply Business says that the Bill represents a welcome recognition that tool theft is a big problem for tradespeople of all types.
Another reason for the Bill’s widespread support is quite simply that we have seen this type of action working in other areas, so I would like to focus on the efficacy of the Bill. Let us take the car industry as a case in point. Back in the 1980s, car theft was a real problem and many cars were regularly stolen, particularly desirable hot hatches such as the Golf GTI. By the early 1990s, car crime accounted for one in four of all crimes. Cars were sometimes stolen merely for joyrides and burned out at the end of the night, but often they were sold on. Insurance premiums for such cars skyrocketed and sales plummeted. As they were profitable types of vehicle, the car industry desperately scrabbled to find a solution.
Two major solutions presented themselves. The first was to make cars more difficult to steal in the first place. One way of doing that was with car immobilisers, which were quickly adopted. In October 1998, they became mandatory in all new cars sold in this country. However, immobilisers are not a deterrent if a thief has access to the vehicle’s key, because they can still steal the car, change the number plates and sell it on easily.
Manufacturers therefore started etching a vehicle identification number, or the car’s registration number, on each window. It made it far more difficult for people to sell a stolen car on, because even if they forged the documents and changed the number plates, they still had to expensively change every single window. Research showed that window etching was a strong deterrent to car thieves. The Home Office’s own statistics show that car thefts reduced consistently since the peak in 1992, when immobilisers and window etching became more widespread. Those facts should give Members great comfort when it comes to the efficacy of the Bill under consideration today.
It is not just the car industry that makes this powerful point. If we look at the bicycle industry, we see exactly the same thing. Denmark and the Netherlands are possibly the two biggest cycling nations in the world, but bike theft in those two countries is dramatically different. The Netherlands’ population is roughly three times that of Denmark, but in 2016, extraordinarily, 30 times more bike thefts were recorded in the Netherlands. One reason is that Denmark has a system of bicycle vehicle identification numbers. Introduced in 1942 by the Danish Government, it provides that all bicycles in Denmark must have a unique code. The VIN code is a combination of letters and digits embedded into the bicycle frame.
Since 1948, it has been illegal to sell a bicycle frame in Denmark without an embedded VIN. Police check the codes of second-hand bikes that are for sale. If someone has registered a code as having been stolen with the police, that bike can be seized and returned to its rightful owner. The dramatic differences in bike thefts between Denmark, which has a VIN system, and the Netherlands, which does not, show powerfully why my hon. Friend’s Bill is so sensible in seeking to extend the system of permanent marking to rural and agricultural vehicles, in order to protect them and prevent their theft.
The Bill as introduced today primarily aims to solve the issue of theft in rural and agricultural communities, which is clearly important. We know that the theft of tractors amounts to some £10 million each year. The Country Land and Business Association has said that, while much of this machinery is being stolen to order and quickly exported to markets overseas, a significant number of machines are being stolen to commit other crimes—so, a double criminal activity. The Countryside Alliance reported that 43% of farmers had experienced a crime committed against them in the past year.
Last year, in Essex, around £380,000-worth of agricultural equipment was stolen from 13 farms in just two months. Following investigations by our fantastic Essex police force, two men were convicted and have been sentenced to a total of six years and 10 months in prison.
The Bill is not just important to rural communities. I understand that it would allow the Secretary of State to expand its remit through secondary legislation to include other types of equipment. The tradesmen in my constituency of Southend West would be extremely grateful if that could happen. Southend West is the proud home of 3,500 independent businesses, and tomorrow we will be celebrating their amazing work on Small Business Saturday. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Rebecca Harris), who steers Conservative Members so well through these Friday debates, would agree with me that south Essex is the home of entrepreneurs and small tradesmen. However, too often they have to suffer from crime. A shocking 78% of tradesmen have had their tools stolen, and only 1% have ever recovered their stolen tools.
Tools theft costs tradesmen in my constituency an average of £4,470 in equipment every year, with nearly a fifth of tradesmen losing more than £5,000 of equipment and tools. Indeed, earlier this year, there was an appalling spate of thefts of tools from vans around Southend, with seven incidents in just two days. As far as I know, the thieves are still at large and the stolen items have not been recovered.
This level of theft has cost the trade industry more than £2.8 billion through lost equipment and lost work. However, that does not mention the inconvenience to and destruction of individuals’ livelihoods when their tools are suddenly stolen—it takes days, if not weeks, to replace them, work is lost and income affected. I therefore ask the Minister to confirm whether the Home Office is looking to expand the provisions of the Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill to specifically cover the theft of tools—particularly power tools—from tradesmen’s vans.
I conclude by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham again for introducing this important Bill and allowing us the time to debate it. I wholeheartedly support it. It will be good for the whole country, and especially good for all tradesmen in Southend West.
Simon Fell (Barrow and Furness) (Con)
It is an honour to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth). I would like to compliment my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on being so lucky in the ballot and congratulate him on bringing forward this Bill, which is very important indeed.
My constituency is largely focused around Barrow, which is an industrial town, but drive for 10 minutes in any direction—well, someone driving south or west will end up in the Irish sea with very wet feet, but driving in the other directions leads to very rural communities. We have the Lickle and Duddon valleys, with farms up and down those communities heading into the Lake district. When I travel around those communities with my NFU rep, the excellent James Airey, I hear time and again that this is the No. 1 issue that my constituents are concerned about. It is a pervasive issue; even if it has not happened to a particular farm, village or community, they will know someone it has happened to, and they are deeply concerned about it.
It is worth looking at some of the statistics that sit behind these crimes. The Countryside Alliance runs an excellent annual survey asking its respondents about their impressions of crime. In 2021, 43% of respondents reported that they had had a crime committed against them in the past year, with 32% of respondents having experienced agricultural machinery theft, which was the third most reported crime. In the 2020 rural crime survey, agricultural machinery theft was the top priority for police to tackle. Again, that is what I hear from my constituents and my farmers. It is something that deeply worries them.
According to NFU Mutual’s 2022 rural crime report, 50% of surveyed members of rural communities said that they were concerned by rural crime, with a third saying it is a major concern. Quad and ATV thefts reported to NFU Mutual cost £2.2 million in 2021. I am sure John Longmire, an excellent farmer in my constituency, will not mind me mentioning that it is a problem that bedevils him and his neighbours.
This issue is not about farmers not looking after their kit or being reckless with it. This is high-demand equipment—it is difficult for people to get their hands on it these days. Shipping delays, the effects of covid and the snarling up of supply chains have contributed to significant demand for both new and second-hand machinery. That lack of availability is driving this problem and driving the activity of the criminal gangs that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham talked about so well. The lack of availability of ATVs has resulted in it taking up to six months to replace a stolen vehicle, and the cost to replace these vehicles has risen dramatically. We see this in the car market, as well—people simply cannot get their hands on the tools and equipment needed to build these things, let alone sell them on the market. Criminal gangs are taking every opportunity they can to step in where there is that need.
As waiting lists grow and market values soar, thieves see quads and ATVs as expensive and easily portable hot-ticket items with a ready resale market in this country and abroad. Thefts are hitting farmers twice as hard: they lose their piece of kit and cannot replace it easily because it is more expensive to do so. That exacerbates their rapidly rising feed costs—which knock on into our economy in the cost of food and living—and their higher energy costs.
Any hon. Member representing a rural area will recognise reports of criminal gangs moving around. We see them in our papers and read about them on Facebook. They suddenly move into an area, and will sweep through a valley picking up absolutely everything they possibly can and moving it out of the area as quickly as possible. Quads and other high-value pieces of kits are their target, but as hon. Members on both sides of the House have mentioned, so are tools of lower value. The Bill’s provisions on the scope of items to be included in future will be important to our constituents.
The Bill does a couple of simple things. I will not rehash what has been said before beyond picking up on a couple of points. Preventing the theft and resale of stolen equipment is absolutely at the heart of the Bill. Stopping that trade—stopping what allows criminals to pick up and easily re-sell items—is what we need to do. Like all good private Members’ Bills, the Bill is simple enough that it absolutely hits the right note, and I hope that it will sail through the next stages as it progresses through Parliament. It gives us the ability to alter and amend it in future. As I have mentioned, it also gives the Secretary of State the power to consider immobilisers, forensic markings and putting owners’ details on vehicles—that is absolutely key. As my hon. Friend mentioned, putting those details on an electronic database means that, if a business goes under or is acquired by someone else, that record is kept, is transferable and exists in the ether for the future.
My experience before I came to this place—to steer slightly off topic—was in fraud and financial crime. We long stood by the view that we could not simply arrest our way out of such high-value, high-volume crimes. Three or four years ago, we were seeing 300,000 reports of fraud a year. We simply do not have the skilled police resource for that, so we relied on other tools. My hon. Friend mentioned that prevention is better than cure, and that was the approach we took. We worked with industry, with Government and with law enforcement to share data to understand the motivators driving those crimes, and to use that data intelligently to track, pursue and, eventually, go after those responsible.
Rural communities feel crime; they feel exposed. When I walk around Barrow, my constituents tell me that they do not see enough police, even though there are an awful lot of police around.
Mark Eastwood (Dewsbury) (Con)
Does my hon. Friend agree that police and crime commissioners, who set the priorities in individual areas, need to look at and take rural crime more seriously?
Simon Fell
My hon. Friend makes a very salient point. Our police and crime commissioners have an essential role to play here, and it is important that they listen. When I do rural crime surveys, I feed them straight back to the police and crime commissioner, because it is important that they are listening to these views. Even though rural areas, by their very nature, are not highly populated, their inhabitants are the people who produce the food we rely on and the cereal that feeds our children every single day, and if we do not look after them and allow their equipment to be stolen, we are in a very poor state indeed.
Just because an area is rural, that should not mean we expect there to be no police presence there at all. Similarly, we cannot flood our rural areas with police officers, first, because that would not be an effective use of resource, and secondly, because of the nature of the gangs who commit these crimes—they sweep through areas and move on, and they know that their speed and their ability to shock, pick up equipment and move on is what allows them to continue. We have to be more clever about how we go after them, and data sharing is key to this.
Sharing the VINs and having immobilisers in place is essential to ensuring that we can stop these criminals in their tracks, go after them and, crucially, go after the money. While they operate around the UK, they shift their money around the UK and are often involved in money laundering and other activities. If we can share this information with law enforcement to make intelligent, tactical decisions about how we go after them, we can make a real impact, not just for the people we represent in our communities who are being hit day after day by these rural crimes, but against these gangs, who have an incredibly successful business model that we need to break. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham again on bringing forward this Bill, which I fully support.
James Grundy (Leigh) (Con)
I will again declare my interest: I live on the Grundy family farm in the village of Lowton in my constituency, which is where my family have lived for over 100 years. Before that, on my father’s side, they lived on farms in Astley and Tyldesley, also in my constituency, and on my mother’s side, on a farm in Chirk, which is in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes), so I can happily say that farming is very much in the bones and blood of my family. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) for bringing forward this incredibly important piece of legislation.
Some may wonder why I, as the MP for Leigh, am speaking in this debate. Many people naturally assume that Leigh is a gritty, urban constituency, but that is not the case. I am happy to say that Leigh’s literal meaning is “meadow”, and the Borough of Wigan, in which the town of Leigh sits somewhat unwillingly, is approximately 70% rural. The farms at the bottom end of the constituency are on the edge of the Cheshire plain, where there is sandy soil. Further north—no doubt in your constituency too, Mr Deputy Speaker—there is much more heavy clay in the soil, which makes farming much more difficult and therefore more marginal.
When it comes to farming, we have seen a number of difficult decades. I am old enough to remember going with my father in the mid-’90s to a farm in Lancashire where he was going to buy a second-hand baler—a Bamford, if I recall correctly. It was one of the old balers where you had to pick the bales up by hand and stack them Dutch bond-style, 300 to a trailer. I remember my father haggling with the other farmer for this piece of equipment, and they were haggling over whether my father was going to pay £700 or £1,000 for the baler. These days, a single part of a piece of farm equipment might cost £700.
Within the last 25 to 30 years, we have seen an incredible increase in the value of farm machinery. As a consequence, these pieces of equipment have become far more desirable targets for criminal elements, and it is not just petty thieves who opportunistically seize something left out in a farmyard or a farmer’s field overnight. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South said—sorry, my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd South; I nearly promoted him dramatically, deserved as it would be—criminal gangs operate across county lines in north Wales, where his constituency lies, Merseyside and Greater Manchester, where my constituency lies. We should not be surprised that they do so, and we are not surprised when criminal gangs cross county lines for the purposes of drug dealing. We are not surprised when criminal gangs steal to order prestige cars with a value of £30,000, £40,000 or £50,000; in fact, there is considerable evidence that county lines organised criminal gang operations are engaged in that sort of theft. Why, then, should we be surprised when, as a Member referred to earlier, criminal gangs cross county lines to steal a piece of farm equipment that could be worth £250,000?
Certainly, we do not realise in how many ways rural communities are affected by these sorts of issues. Organised crime increases as the value of the prize increases, and rural communities and farms are being targeted for the huge amounts that can be made simply from passing on one piece of farm equipment. It is no surprise, therefore, that the game has changed for criminal gangs. Earlier I mentioned a £702,000 second-hand Bamford baler. Twenty-five or 30 years ago—when mobile phones were a rarity and there was no internet—people could not just take a baler down the pub and fence it to the dodgy bloke who sits in the corner. If anyone wants to contradict me, I would love to hear the story, because it would be great to get it in Hansard for all time.
These days, with the ability of criminal gangs to operate not just across county lines but internationally, it is entirely possible that a very valuable piece of farm equipment could be stolen and perhaps even exported abroad, and the customer receiving it might not even know that it was stolen. As I described somewhat floridly earlier, we might have reached a point where the security mechanisms have not kept pace with technology and with the increasing value of farming equipment. Effectively, having valuable farming equipment without putting security measures in place is like having a house full of Fabergé eggs with no lock on the door, or with the door open. If I recall correctly, my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North said earlier that he wondered whether we produce Fabergé eggs on our farm, but sadly we do not—if only farming was so profitable these days.
For the record, we are not, as some people might suspect, a wealthy and large agribusiness. My family are smallholders and have sometimes been tenant farmers in the past. For the large agribusinesses, the issues that arise from the theft of farm machinery can be extremely deleterious and problematic. For small famers and, indeed, tenant farmers, who obviously cannot borrow against the value of the property that they work on, it can be a death blow if a very expensive and irreplaceable piece of machinery is stolen.
Ben Everitt
This is a critical point about inequality. As was mentioned earlier, accessing insurance is increasingly a huge cost for farms. Large agribusinesses with multiple farms, but with one home farm for the kit they share across them, have the buying power for insurance, but for our smallholders—the family farms that produce food for our nation and have been doing so for years as part of our rural communities—it is increasingly difficult to meet the extra costs, including insurance.
James Grundy
My hon. Friend speaks adroitly on this issue: the costs for small farmers, especially at the moment, are absolutely incredible. Indeed, I recall recently my father saying that this year the bill for fertiliser was in the many thousands. The bill for insurance can be in the many thousands—to add to that, sometimes when criminals steal farm equipment from the shed, they burn down the shed to hide the evidence and obscure any breadcrumb trail of clues. In such cases, the costs go into the hundreds of thousands, because the farmer not only loses the equipment, but the shed, which is incredibly expensive to replace. If the shed happens to contain a large amount of hay and straw, it not only acts as a serious accelerant to the fire but the farmer loses the year’s crop. When a farmer brings in a crop, its price is at its low point, but when there has been a barn fire and it needs to be replaced, it is at the top of the market. An incredibly serious series of knock-on impacts can happen from this sort of rural crime.
It is worth remembering that a wide range of organisations, including the NFU, the Countryside Alliance and others, are fully supportive of my hon. Friend’s Bill. It is long before time that such legislation was brought forward, and I commend my hon. Friend on doing so. Having come third in the private Member’s Bill ballot, if I recall correctly from earlier, he could have done any number of things, and it is much to his credit that he has done this.
We often talk about minority representation, and it is worth remembering that farmers and rural folk are an incredibly tiny proportion of the people in this country; it is easy to forget about them. Even in my hon. Friend’s beautiful rural constituency, farmers constitute only a tiny number of his electors. He has done great good with this piece of legislation, and I commend his efforts. I fully support what he is doing, and now I will sit down, as I have spoken for some time and I understand that other colleagues probably wish to contribute.
Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on bringing this Bill to the House. Equipment and tool theft is a major issue, not just in my beautiful constituency of Hastings and Rye, but across the United Kingdom. The impact of equipment and tool theft should not be underestimated. In an instant, hard-working people’s lives are destroyed by criminals who have no regard for their victims, and it is right that we are discussing this issue today, and I hope that we as lawmakers can make it as difficult as possible for those remorseless criminals to succeed.
Crime in our rural areas causes high levels of anxiety and disruption, and many farmers and rural residents feel vulnerable due to their isolated locations. Sleepless nights are common. We have tool theft in rural areas, and the numbers do not make for pretty reading. Research in 2019 by the Federation of Master Builders estimated that more than three quarters of Britain’s builders have been victims of tool theft, with some having lost more than £20,000 worth of tools in the past 10 years. Of builders who had tools stolen between 2009 and 2019, the most common value of loss was £2,500. One in 10 builders say that they had at least £10,000 worth of tools stolen; 2% said the loss was at least £20,000. Over a 40-year working life, therefore, a builder will typically lose £10,000 worth of tools.
The crime puts a financial burden on roofers, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and builders, but it also has an impact on their mental health. The Federation of Master Builders estimates that 15% of builders suffer from anxiety and 11%—around one in 10—suffer from depression, with some reporting panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.
Equipment theft is also relevant in rural areas such as in beautiful Hastings and Rye, where residents in villages such as East Guldeford, Iden, Camber and Pett all suffer from the theft of garden and farm equipment. The Countryside Alliance’s 2021 rural crime survey revealed that 95% of respondents believed that crime in their community had been significant in the past year, and 70% thought it had increased during the period. Last year, the rate of rural crime in East Sussex cost £500,000, as the insurer NFU Mutual revealed recently; that is a 12% fall from 2020, but there are worries for the future, with the figure rising again towards the end of 2021. In East Sussex, farm vehicles remain a top target, with thieves going after Land Rovers, quad bikes and trailers. Alarmingly, rustling has become more lucrative for criminal gangs. The latest analysis shows that farm animals worth an estimated £2.4 million were stolen in 2021. East Guldeford in my patch is on the west Kent-East Sussex border and has suffered from sheep rustling—it is hard to think that that sort of thing happens in this day and age.
Ben Everitt
Is my hon. Friend aware that, in recent years, there have been reports of sheep being not only rustled but butchered in the fields and then taken off to wherever that dodgy meat is sold?
Sally-Ann Hart
My hon. Friend is absolutely right; that is known to have happened in my constituency as well. Fuel theft is also on the rise. We might not think of sheep or fuel as equipment for farming and rural pursuits, but they are in many ways.
The south-east is the second-worst affected region in England after the midlands. For the sake of clarity, it is worth highlighting that legislation is in place to tackle tool and equipment theft, such as under the Theft Act 1968 and the Consumer Rights Act 2015, but that needs to go further. I agree with the Bill that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham is bringing forward to widen the protection of many people’s livelihoods.
There are many things that people can do to reduce the risk of having their tools stolen. Sussex police set up a rural crime team, because some 62% of the Sussex police area is dedicated to farming and Sussex is defined as a significantly rural area by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Last month, Sussex police had an action day to tackle burglaries in rural areas and visited many farms and small rural businesses. People were given DNA kits to mark their valuable tools, equipment and machinery, as well as CCTV posters and information on using the UK’s national property register. That might be laborious and not always possible for larger equipment, but it is important for people to protect their property.
The Bill intends to prevent the theft and resale of equipment and tools used by tradespeople in agricultural and other businesses. It has much merit and deserves our support. In this period of high inflation, it is simply unfair and cruel that tradespeople and farmers live with the constant fear of having their equipment, which provides them with a livelihood, stolen and sold to others. I am glad that we are having a serious discussion about how to confront the issue and protect hard-working tradespeople and farmers across the country, particularly in my beautiful constituency of Hastings and Rye.
Tom Randall (Gedling) (Con)
I rise to speak in support of the Bill. Unlike my hon. Friends the Members for Buckingham (Greg Smith), for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) and for Leigh (James Grundy), I have no interests to declare. I have never ridden a quad bike, and it is probably in everyone’s interest that I have not.
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham on winning a top prize in the lottery of parliamentary life by securing his high place in the private Member’s Bill ballot, on his choice of Bill and on his eloquent justification for it. I understand that he got the idea for the Bill from a constituent’s comment on Facebook. It is nice to see that he has been able to harness the power of social media so positively in proposing this practical and timely legislation on the Floor of the House.
The general thrust of the Bill, as we have heard from so many hon. Members this morning, is on agricultural machinery, but I understand there is scope to extend it further. Clause 1(2)(b) speaks of
“other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities.”
This could extend to tradesmen and their tools. Although I recognise that agricultural theft and rural crime is a big issue in counties such as Nottinghamshire, as we are a great farming county—I have constituents who work in agriculture—I will focus on how the Bill could be extended into other areas. As Gedling is a predominantly suburban constituency, it has many plumbers, electricians and builders who would benefit from such an extension.
Equipment theft has a particularly strong impact. Having one’s tools stolen obviously has a financial cost and causes disruption. I have spoken to constituents who are victims, and their stolen tools are sometimes the ones they bought as an apprentice, so there is a great deal of sentimental value attached to them. They are also literally the tools of the trade, so their work stops until the tools have been replaced.
Research by the Federation of Master Builders found that, over a 40-year career, a builder typically loses about £10,000-worth of tools and six working days to tool theft. In my preparation for this debate, I was shocked by the scale of tool theft, with 78% of tradesmen having had their tools stolen, more than 38% having had tools stolen from outside their home and 11% having had to take time off work, or having had to decline new work, while they source new equipment. Nearly a third of tradesmen are not financially compensated at all for tool theft.
At present, as we have heard, there is no regulation of the second-hand tool market. Items are sold without proof of origin, which facilitates theft, and it is a large market. Direct Line has found that a third of British consumers have bought second-hand tools at some point, with six in 10 tradesmen having been approached by, or having seen, someone trying to sell second-hand tools that they suspected to be stolen.
Of course, there is already a legal framework in place. Section 1 of the Theft Act 1968 states:
“A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it”.
There is also an offence of handling stolen goods. Tackling these crimes is resource-intensive, as illustrated by a case in Gedling last year in which power tools were stolen in my hometown of Arnold. The theft was reported in Gedling Eye, which said the victim saw the stolen power tools being advertised for sale on an internet auction site. After local police officers were alerted, a plan was hatched to reel in the suspect.
The victim had urged people in the industry to keep their eyes open and their ear to the ground for any information, and he and his labourers saw that two of the stolen items were up for sale online. His wife reported it to the police, and a plan was put in place. They made contact with the seller, which led them to get an address. They arranged a time to collect the items and informed the police. The suspects got quite a shock when, instead of the proposed buyer, it was police officers who turned up to the address in Bestwood. The stolen items were recovered from nearby gardens and returned to the victims.
I think that story illustrates the wide-ranging impact of tool and equipment theft on victims and on the wider society. The victim’s wife told the press:
“We were so angry and stressed as only a few weeks earlier we had tools stolen from the lorry. We were beside ourselves with worry as this was the second time my husband had to inform his employer of yet another theft.”
She explained that her husband worked for a small company and,
“it’s the smaller firms which are affected more by the cost and inconvenience of these sort of callous thefts.
This second incident left us feeling nervous and anxious and very vulnerable. We were incredibly upset and it makes you so angry when hard working people like us have this sort of thing happen and someone steals your belongings.
One of our elderly neighbours was also very shaken by this as her property backs out onto the private car park where the lorry was parked when this happened.”
I congratulate Nottinghamshire police on their ingenuity in organising this set-up, but the example I have given is a rare one; I understand only 1% of tradesmen have had their stolen tools recovered, and such operations are resource-intensive and difficult to set up. In that spirit, I welcome the ongoing recruitment of an extra 20,000 police officers throughout this Parliament, and I know there are many working in Gedling and Nottinghamshire who have been recently appointed.
This legislation can add further steps to make the retrieval of stolen tools easier and make it less attractive to steal them in the first place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham explained when introducing his ten-minute rule Bill, the intention could be to require online marketplaces to require individuals selling second-hand tools to show the unique identifiers of such items in a searchable format. That would close down the ways for people to turn their stolen goods into money and facilitate victims, police and insurance companies’ tracking down stolen items. In the example I gave of the power tools stolen in Arnold, it would have made them far easier to identify.
I welcome this straightforward initiative and I note the parallels with the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013, which was also brought in as a private Member’s Bill and introduced a more robust regulatory regime for scrap metal dealers, reducing opportunities for metal thieves to sell stolen material. A Home Office review of the 2013 Act concluded that the overwhelming view of those who responded was that it had improved regulation of the scrap metal industry and in doing so helped to achieve reductions in metal theft.
The statistics we have heard today are quite shocking. It is fantastic that this legislation is coming before the House and I hope that, like the 2013 Act, the Bill will pass the House and have similar results.
Simon Baynes (Clwyd South) (Con)
It is a particular pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Tom Randall). He gave an excellent speech that really went into the detail of how upsetting equipment theft is and how important it is that we try to reduce the level of theft for people running businesses and farms in our constituencies.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth) said in her excellent speech, which went through the various different clauses, the purpose of the Bill is to prevent the theft of all-terrain vehicles such as quad bikes. However, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling and other hon. Members have outlined, the Bill also provides a power for the Secretary of State to extend the legislation to
“other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities”,
such as the construction sector.
So there we have it. The Bill addresses not only the rural market and rural areas, but small businesses. That fits my Clwyd South constituency well, since it has both significant rural areas and urban areas where small businesses, particularly in construction-related fields, are very important. For my constituents, this Bill is an excellent step forward in protecting their businesses. As such, I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on bringing it forward. It has clearly been quite a long process. As he said, there has been a change of cast on the ministerial Bench, although it is excellent to see the current Minister in his place. He is a staunch supporter of everything we are putting forward today.
I would first like to concentrate on the second part of the Bill, which is on the protection of tradespeople. As has been mentioned, 78% of tradespeople have had their tools stolen, and only 1% is ever recovered. The Bill addresses an extremely important issue that bedevils many in our constituencies. The prominence of the second-hand tool market helps to drive tool theft across the country. Second-hand tools are more affordable and can be relatively easy to source. The second-hand tool market is not regulated, which means that sellers do not have to prove the origin of items that they are selling or evidence of original purchase. Stakeholders and those working in trades have argued that this encourages and facilitates tool theft, because it makes selling stolen equipment simple and easy. That is a major part of the problem.
Research from Direct Line insurance found that nearly a third of UK consumers have bought second-hand tools at some point. Six in 10 tradespeople have been approached by or have seen someone trying to sell second-hand tools that they suspected were stolen. That summarises the issue and the problem we are facing in the second part of the Bill.
The main part of the Bill, the beginning, looks at the farming community. My hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (James Grundy), who is not currently in the Chamber, gave an excellent speech and made reference to Chirk, where part of his family come from and where I live in Clwyd South. I made reference earlier to the Ceiriog valley, which lies close to Chirk. There, we have seen clearly the problems that many Members have outlined. We are talking about small farms, and in this case livestock—mainly sheep—farming.
I must pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt), who gave an excellent speech that mainly focused on arable farming. I speak as someone with some arable farming in the Maelor, but mainly livestock farming and sheep farming on the uplands, particularly in the Ceiriog valley and the Dee valley. This is the community I grew up in at Lake Vyrnwy, which lies a little way south of Clywd South, where sheep farming is crucial. For those small farms trying to look after sheep over a large upland area, a quad bike is of particular importance. The point made earlier is that small farms, some of which may be tenant farms, are particularly vulnerable. That is another reason I strongly support this Bill.
The Big Farming Survey carried out by the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution found that 38% of the 15,000 respondents said that rural crime was a source of stress. The explanatory notes to the Bill state:
“An estimated 900-1200 quad bikes and ATVs are stolen in England and Wales each year. Findings…showed only 22% of premises in the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector reported to protect their vehicles as a crime prevention measure.”
Clearly, the Bill is addressing significant needs. NFU Mutual published its “Rural Crime Report 2022”, which assesses the level of rural crime and the impact that it has on communities. Although it found that rural crime dropped by 9.3% in 2021, it still cost £40.5 million in the UK.
It also pointed out that, despite that decrease,
“initial indications reveal that the first quarter of 2022 has seen thieves making up for lost time over the pandemic, with costs over 40% higher than the same period last year.”
An issue that I raised earlier—which was also raised, very eloquently, by my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh—is that of thieves coming from different areas. It is a major issue for my constituents. County lines is a problem in the drugs world, but it is a problem in this world as well. Farmers, particularly those in small upland areas, really need our support, which the Bill aims to provide. As has been mentioned, my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham introduced a ten-minute rule Bill that would require people selling second-hand tools in online marketplaces to reveal a serial number, in a searchable format, for each item. Measures of that kind are vital, helping tradespeople and protecting agricultural equipment.
The Bill will be of enormous benefit both to tradespeople and to the rural communities that characterise my constituency, and I support it strongly.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)
I thank Members on this side of the House for joining us today—the Benches opposite are disappointingly empty, I must say—to discuss this extremely important Bill. Let me begin by congratulating, strongly and warmly, my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on the eloquent way in which he presented it and on the persistent manner in which he developed it, over a long period—indeed, as some Members have pointed out, during the time spent by several of my predecessors in this role. He has made a compelling case for it today, and I can confirm straightaway that the Government fully support it. We will do all we can do ensure that it is on the statute book as quickly as possible, and is then implemented in full.
We believe that the Bill will provide an important additional tool to help the police to drive down crime, but of course this is by no means the only action we are taking in that regard. As I said earlier in an intervention on the shadow Minister, we are on track to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers by March next year—in just a few months’ time—when we will have about 149,000, a record number. Never in our country’s history will we have seen more police officers serving our constituents. As I also said earlier, the crime of theft has fallen by 46% since Labour left office. That is a track record of which I think Conservative Members, and the Government more widely, can be extremely proud.
This is a well-constructed Bill. It covers the theft of agricultural ATVs and equipment but also, potentially, wider categories, as a number of Members have pointed out. We expect it to lead to a significant decrease in the theft of such vehicles and equipment, as a result of, for instance, the requirement for immobilisers to be installed in newly sold ATVs and the requirement for forensic markings to be made standard. Those measures will make it much harder for criminals to sell on stolen material, and we believe they will serve as a strong deterrent.
As we have heard during the debate, the theft of agricultural vehicles from farmers can cause severe disruption to their work—work that is important not only to them, their families and their livelihoods but to the whole country, because it feeds us, our families and our constituents as well. It is therefore essential to ensure that they are protected. I was pleased to hear my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham describe the widespread support that the Bill has received from interested parties, including the National Farmers Union and NFU Mutual.
The principle of the Bill is very important. The Government expect manufacturers to play their full part in protecting items from theft. Unfortunately, my predecessors did not have as much assistance as they would have wanted from parts of the manufacturing sector, which is why the Bill is so important.
The Bill will help to mitigate the significant effects felt by the agricultural community. As we have heard, about 900 quad bikes and all-terrain vehicles are stolen every year, which is simply unacceptable. NFU Mutual’s 2022 rural crime report said that the total cost of insurance claims due to the theft of agricultural vehicles—of course, that includes more than just ATVs—last year was £9.1 million. It is therefore extremely important that we take action in this area.
My hon. Friend said in his excellent speech that despite the technological advancements made across the ATV market, the inclusion of basic security features such as those that we have discussed has been much slower, despite the exhortations of some of my predecessors. The fitting of immobilisers and forensic markings as standard is an inexpensive and straightforward measure. We have assessed the cost of those two things and it is very reasonable at under £200 per machine, which is a small fraction of the typical cost of such machines. That modest cost is far outweighed by the benefits of reducing the thefts that we are tragically seeing.
I would like to spend a moment talking to some of the points raised in the various excellent speeches made by Government Members. I should say that the shadow Minister’s speech was excellent as well, apart from the slightly incomplete comments on crime, which has of course been going down, as the crime survey for England and Wales points out, to say nothing of the record police numbers that we will soon receive.
My hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) talked about expanding the Bill’s provisions not just to other agricultural equipment but to other equipment used by tradespeople, builders, craftsmen and so on. My hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) also made that point eloquently, as did my hon. Friends the Members for Gedling (Tom Randall) and for Clwyd South (Simon Baynes).
I draw the House’s attention to clause 1(2), which sets out the kind of equipment that might be subject to the provisions that we have been discussing. In subsection (2)(a), we have mechanically propelled vehicles for use off-road. Subsection (2)(b) talks about
“other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities.”
Of course, working as a builder or tradesperson would qualify as commercial activity. It will be open to the Secretary of State to make regulations in due course covering not just agricultural vehicles, all-terrain vehicles and so on, but the equipment used by builders and tradespeople that hon. Members, including my hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth), have talked about.
Having heard what hon. Members said, what I can take back to the Department is that we should be looking at making regulations in those areas as well, certainly at some point. We may start with ATVs and agricultural vehicles and then move on. Those points were extremely well made, and they have certainly been heard by me and the Department.
A number of hon. Members made other good points, not least my hon. Friends the Members for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt)—he spoke second from the Back Benches—and for Southend West. There was also an intervention from my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Sir Greg Knight)—who I do not think is in his place at the moment—about recording and ensuring that proper databases hold information on serial numbers and so on.
Again, I draw the House’s attention to clause 2, in particular subsections (2) and (3). The regulations that the Secretary of State can make may specify the kind of information that must be recorded. Subsection (2)(c) makes it clear that that includes the markings with a unique identifier. Subsection (3) specifies not just when the information is recorded and how long it must be kept, but the form in which it must be kept. Reference was made to storing that information online, so that it survives even if the business does not or it moves on. Subsection (3)(c) is very specific that that may include an online system—that is on line 25 of page 2 of the Bill.
Having listened to what Members have said today, I can say that making sure that the regulations also specify online information storage is a particularly important point. A few points have come out of this debate that will, genuinely, influence and change the way that we think about the regulations implementing the Bill once it becomes law, which I hope will happen as quickly as possible.
I also thank my hon. Friends the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) and the Member for Leigh (James Grundy)—who talked about his family farm, the Grundy farm—for their extremely vivid descriptions of the impact that these crimes have on rural communities.
This is an extremely well-constructed piece of legislation. It clearly commands the support of everyone who has spoken on it and of the Opposition. I thank the shadow Minister for expressing her support for the Bill. Most of all, Mr Deputy Speaker, I wish to conclude by thanking, once again, my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham for the work that he has done in developing the Bill so carefully and so thoughtfully, through so many different Ministers in recent months. He is doing the House, his constituents and the whole country a great service by bringing this Bill forward, and I put on record my thanks to him for everything that he has done.
Greg Smith
With the leave of the House, I wish to thank everybody who has spoken in this debate. It is incredibly pleasing to have secured the support of everybody who has spoken, including, not least, the hon. Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) on behalf of the Opposition, as well as Members on the Conservative Benches. I will not rehash the arguments that I made earlier, other than to say that I really think that the Bill will make a difference when it comes to combatting rural crime and other forms of equipment theft into the future. I look forward to working with my right hon. Friend the Minister to make that happen and to get the Bill on the statute book.
I am particularly grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Milton Keynes North (Ben Everitt) for his support and back-up on this. He has worked alongside me, not least in the discussions that we had the other week with farmers from our respective constituencies. His roll-call of equipment that he used in his farming days was insightful. I just hope that, given recent controversies, no one felt the need to google any of it during the course of the debate.
My hon. Friend the Member for Southend West (Anna Firth), in her clause-by-clause analysis of the Bill, gave the perfect audition for the Bill Committee. Many other hon. and right hon. Members spoke in this debate, and I am grateful to each and every one of them for their support. To finish, from the multiple references to Fabergé eggs from my hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (James Grundy), I think we know what is on his list to Father Christmas this year. I thank the House and look forward to continuing to pilot this Bill through Committee and beyond.
Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)
Congratulations, Mr Smith. Having represented an agricultural constituency for more than 30 years and had many reports of theft of equipment from farms during that period of time, I know that the farmers of the Ribble Valley will be very interested in this legislation.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read a Second time; to stand committed to a Public Bill Committee (Standing Order No. 63).
Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill
Wednesday 1st February 2023
(1 year, 10 months ago)
Public Bill CommitteesRead Full debate Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
The Chair
Before we begin, I have some reminders. First, will hon. Members ensure that their phones are on silent? Any speaking notes can be emailed to hansardnotes@parliament.uk. For the benefit of any officials, do not hand the Minister any notes directly or I will have you expelled from the room.
My selection and grouping list for the sitting is available online and in the room. No amendments to the Bill have been tabled.
Clause 1
Requirements for sale of equipment
Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. The Bill seeks to prevent the theft of all-terrain vehicles such as quad bikes. ATVs have become all-too desirable to thieves and are largely vulnerable due to a lack of security features. An estimated 900 to 1,200 quad bikes and ATVs are stolen in England and Wales each year. I got live data yesterday from the national police lead on rural crime, Superintendent Andrew Huddleston, and we know that between 1 December last year and 30 January this year some 147 quad bikes were stolen across England and Wales, along with 248 pieces of heavy plant and other agricultural machinery. The figures are considerable.
The Bill gives my right hon. and learned Friend the Home Secretary the power to make regulations requiring immobilisers and forensic marking to be fitted to all new ATVs. An immobiliser is a device that allows a vehicle to start only if the correct key or fob is inserted. A quad bike, ATV or other vehicle fitted with an immobiliser is therefore protected against many forms of hotwiring or imitation keys from would-be thieves. Critically, forensic marking will enable police officers to identify a vehicle easily using a hand-held scanner or ultraviolet torch and to verify the true owner. Importantly, those measures make a stolen vehicle harder to sell on, which will have a deterrent effect.
Before I get to what each clause in the Bill does, I am aware of calls from colleague on both sides of the House for the measures to be extended to cover many more pieces of equipment, including power tools and other agricultural equipment. I entirely support those calls. Indeed, that is where the Bill started. However, to pre-empt any further debate on that, the Bill provides the power for the Home Secretary to extend its provisions through secondary legislation explicitly to other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities.
Vicky Ford (Chelmsford) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for the work that he has done on the Bill. As I have an urban constituency, I obviously do not see much theft of agricultural equipment, but many of my constituents—small traders in particular—have had machinery stolen from vans, so I agree that we should be using whatever innovations or technology are available in that area to try to protect those tradespeople from future thefts. I therefore add my voice to those encouraging the Minister to look at using the powers under the Bill for thefts from vans, sheds and other places where people try to store their important equipment, which is vital to their future prospects.
Greg Smith
I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for her support for the Bill, and I entirely agree with her. It is important that we prove the concept of just how effective forensic marking in particular can be and, as soon as is practically and humanly possible, get it rolled out to every piece of equipment that we see being stolen far too frequently across our country.
In my own constituency, we had a spate of break-ins to trades vans where thousands on thousands of pounds of power tools were stolen. That knocks people out from being able to work; it can be days, weeks and sometimes months before they can get back to earning their living. These tools are critical, but it is vital that we prove the concept in negotiation with industry, manufacturers, the police and bodies such as the National Farmers Union and NFU Mutual. That company insures a large proportion of the equipment in this country, starting with quads and all-terrain vehicles. I believe the explicit powers in the Bill to roll it out further at a later date through secondary legislation is the right way to go.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for bringing forward such an excellent Bill. Farmers in Loughborough have explained to me the impact that the theft of their vehicles has on the farming community and business sheerly financially, as well as because they do not have those tools to work. In Loughborough, we also have Peter Booth, who set up the #noVANber campaign. As a plumber, he was sick to death of discovering that his friends were losing their tools from their vans. I urge the Minister to include that in future plans for the Bill.
Greg Smith
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for her support. I discussed the Bill with her in some depth during its creation, and I am grateful for her input in getting it this far.
Let me briefly explain what each of the clauses is designed to do. Clause 1 provides a power for the Secretary of State to make regulations to restrict the sale of equipment where certain requirements have not been met. The requirements are set out in clause 1(3), including that the equipment is fitted with an immobiliser, a unique identifier and
“a visible indication that it is marked with a unique identifier.”
Clause 1(2)(a) defines machinery to allow the provision to cover all-terrain vehicles such as quad bikes. Clause 1(2)(b) allows regulations to specify
“other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities”—
for example, in the construction sector, or tools and equipment used by tradespeople. Clause 1(4) states that the provisions cannot relate to sales of equipment within the supply chain—for example, from a manufacturer to a trader—as the Bill is very much about the point of sale to the end user. I urge the Committee that the clause should stand part of the Bill.
Clause 2 provides a power for the Secretary of State to make regulations to specify information to be recorded in connection with the sale—for example, the owner’s contact details and details of the specific forensic marking. At this point, it is important to note that there are many different types of forensic marking in the marketplace. The Bill does not seek to say one is necessarily better than the others—that is for the regulations that will be set out through secondary legislation in conjunction with negotiation with the industry. The regulations may include
“when the information must be recorded”,
how long it must be kept and what form it must be kept in. For example, the regulations may specify that the information must be held in an online database. In practice, I expect the information will be registered on the database maintained by the company whose forensic marking product has been used, rather than some form of new, national database. Clause 2(4) excludes second-hand equipment or sales within the supply chain. I commend the clause to the Committee.
Clause 3 covers enforcement of the legislation in the event of non-compliance. Clause 3(1) creates the offence. A person commits an offence if they sell equipment in breach of the requirements imposed by the regulations made under clause 1 or clause 2.
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on bringing the Bill forward, and I am pleased to support it. I want to point out, particularly to the Minister, that while the losses that the farming community suffer are terrible, and it is awful when criminals benefit from the subsequent sale of this equipment, another dimension is its use for antisocial purposes, particularly in constituencies such as mine, where quad bikes are being used to terrorise communities. These individuals are using cycleways and cycle paths, and the police find it incredibly difficult to apprehend them, because they are really reckless in their use of these quad bikes. If, through the Bill, we can stop those individuals getting their hands on these all-terrain vehicles, it is to be welcomed, and I am happy to support it.
Greg Smith
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. We work well together on the Transport Committee, and it is a pleasure to work with him on the Bill. He makes an excellent point. The immobiliser and unique key provisions in the Bill are the most critical to preventing the antisocial use of stolen quad bikes. As I said on Second Reading, at the moment it is far too common for a key for a particular manufacturer’s quad bike to be able to start all of them. If we make it far more difficult for opportunist thieves and those who wish to go joyriding in an antisocial manner to be able to start the things in the first place, it will cut down on that antisocial use.
Ian Paisley (North Antrim) (DUP)
This is the nub of the issue, and it is why I support the Bill. I had a case in my constituency in a place called Derrykeighan—I will help Hansard with that afterwards—where two quad bikes were stolen. Because immobilisers were on the bikes, the owner and the police were able to trace them to where they were being held and retrieve his stolen property, which had been stolen to order. Other farmers in my constituency have had similar vehicles stolen without these excellent immobilisers on them and have lost their vehicles forever. This is a key aspect of the legislation and why I support it.
Greg Smith
I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I am grateful for his support for the Bill.
Kevin Brennan (Cardiff West) (Lab)
The hon. Gentleman knows that I support his Bill, and I am pleased to be able to attend the Committee. I represent a city constituency, and there was a fatality in my constituency last year involving a quad bike not 50 yards from my home. I will not comment on the details, because not all the forensics have been done, but although only one person died, it could so easily have been much worse in a crowded urban environment, because it is a spot where families and others regularly pass by. Does he agree that it is important to emphasise that as well as helping to prevent theft and make theft less profitable, this legislation will also prevent antisocial behaviour and its very serious consequences?
Greg Smith
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his support of the Bill, and I am very sorry to hear about the fatality in his constituency. He is right that although a significant number of quad bike thefts are for resale and monetisation, some are for antisocial purposes. The thieves do not necessarily know how to ride them correctly, and these are not easy pieces of equipment to drive. It is very easy to have accidents, and therefore the antisocial and inexperienced use of them can lead to serious injury or, as in the tragic case in his constituency, the loss of life. I hope that the Bill will go some way to saving lives and preventing very preventable accidents from occurring.
Brendan Clarke-Smith (Bassetlaw) (Con)
I thank my hon. Friend for giving way; he is being generous with his time. I echo the points that were made so eloquently by the hon. Members for Easington, for North Antrim and for Cardiff West. I represent a rural community, and this is a real menace to us. On enforcement, I really welcome the measures in the Bill that will enable trading standards and district councils to issue fines. Will he join me in encouraging trading standards and district councils to make use of those powers once they are granted to them?
Greg Smith
I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. He has read my mind—or maybe my script—because I am coming right now to the very point of clause 3 and how the Bill will be enforced. It will be an offence to fail to install an immobiliser, forensically mark the equipment or register the relevant information on the appropriate database as will be set out. A person who commits that offence will be liable on summary conviction to a fine. The level of the fine will be specified in regulations, but it will be a level 5 fine, which is an unlimited fine.
Breach of the requirements will be enforced, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bassetlaw alluded to, by a local weights and measures authority or district council under schedule 5 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The Bill amends paragraph 10 of that schedule to include clause 3 of the Bill to provide trading standards officers with the necessary powers. I do not anticipate non-compliance as manufacturers and trade associations have been involved in the Bill’s development from an early stage. We have held many roundtables, including in Parliament.
I turn to clause 4. Subsection (1) provides further detail on what regulations made under the Bill may include. Such regulations may make different provisions for different purposes, which will allow for a requirement for certain equipment to be forensically marked and registered on a database while not requiring immobilisers to be fitted if they are not relevant to the equipment or not desirable. That goes beyond quad bikes and ATVs and into other equipment. Regulations made under the Bill will be subject to the affirmative procedure so will be debated in each House.
Finally, clause 5 covers the Bill’s extent, commencement and short title. Subsection (1) states that the legislation extends to England and Wales. Subsection (2) provides for commencement, with the Bill coming into force six months after receiving Royal Assent and becoming an Act. However, its provisions will not commence until regulations are made through the necessary secondary legislation.
Ian Paisley
It is great to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. I commend the hon. Member for Buckingham for introducing the Bill. These thefts probably affect every part of the UK. I mentioned earlier a theft in my constituency and, unfortunately, that was not a one-off but has been a feature, with crime gangs targeting and deliberately seeking to steal plant machinery and now quads and motorcycles from farmlands and farm owners as well as other private owners. It is very good to have legislation that puts the onus on both the manufacturer and a willing consumer to have his or her vehicle properly secured.
I hope that the Bill will ultimately extend to Northern Ireland and protect our farmlands and rural communities. I recently hosted a meeting with the Police Service of Northern Ireland, the Ulster Farmers Union and a number of rural dwellers who had suffered the scourge of these crimes, and there was a willingness in Bushmills that evening to ensure that something is done about it. Thankfully, this timely legislation touches on that and identifies the problem and a solution. I therefore commend it and will willingly support it.
Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)
I rise to speak in support of this Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham, who represents the constituency directly next door to mine. Our constituencies have much in common, not least beautiful countryside and excellent farmers dedicated to producing superb food and caring for our environment. Sadly, they also have in common the theft of a considerable amount of agricultural machinery, and especially quad vehicles.
I recently visited a farm near Saunderton in my constituency and was told that the theft of such machinery was undoubtedly a problem and had been for many years. In the current economic climate, theft of equipment is the last thing farmers need, not just because of the cost of replacing it but the fact that they are unable to carry out their work while they wait for new equipment, which is not always easy to replace quickly. The help that my hon. Friend’s Bill will bring will be extremely beneficial.
Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone, for the second time in two days. I will keep this brief, but I join others in congratulating the hon. Member for Buckingham on securing so much cross-party support for his private Member’s Bill and on getting it to Committee. We very much hope that the Bill will successfully play a part in clamping down on ATV and quad bike theft.
As other Members have outlined, this issue has long been prevalent in rural communities, afflicting those involved in agricultural work in particular, but as we have heard, the impact is felt in all our constituencies across the country in different ways. According to NFU Mutual, around 900 to 1,200 quad bikes are stolen every year. NFU Mutual’s most recent crime report, published in August 2022, found that rural theft had risen by 40% from the previous year, with the overall cost to the UK economy estimated at £40.5 million.
Quad bikes are predominantly manufactured by just two companies, with little technological development to the same basic key system they have had for over 35 years. I am reliably informed that it is possible to start up one of the most common makes and models of quad bike with just a screwdriver, and a quick Google search provides detailed instructions as to how to start these quad bikes without a key.
The theft of ATVs has a significant financial impact on both customers and insurers. As well as the financial impact, quad bike theft perpetuates further and wider criminal activity. On Second Reading, I spoke of a recent spate of quad bike theft-related crimes in my own constituency of Halifax. That includes their use in antisocial behaviour and vandalism. A number of hon. Members from all parties have made the point about vehicles, after their theft, being used in a variety of types of vandalism and antisocial behaviour afflicting communities, whether they are rural or urban.
As outlined, the Bill seeks to mandate the fitting of an immobiliser and forensic markings on all quad bikes and all-terrain vehicles sold in the UK. The Bill is relatively tight in scope, which is often the winning formula for a successful private Member’s Bill. However, it will also allow for the enactment of secondary legislation that could expand the Bill’s remit to cover other agricultural and construction equipment. Again, on Second Reading I spoke of the problem of theft from commercial vans—a point made by the right hon. Member for Chelmsford and others. According to research carried out by Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles in 2021, 27% of van drivers had fallen victim to tool theft in the previous 12 months. The total cost of all lost tools and equipment is estimated to be about £15 million a year. Volkswagen estimates that the associated downtime for drivers who must replace those tools costs £550 a day per van.
In conclusion, we very much welcome the opportunity to support the Bill through its passage on to the statute book. We hope that it makes the difference that we would all like to see, and we very much hope that there is a further opportunity to consider and evaluate its impact with regard to what other types of kit it might be appropriate to extend these protections to.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)
It is a pleasure once again to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. Let me start by expressing my very warm congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham on the work that he has done in developing and bringing forward this Bill with a great deal of conscientiousness, perseverance and, most important of all, charm. That is a quality not universally present, I have to say—[Hon. Members: “Oh!”] But it is certainly well represented by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham. He has done a very good job of talking the Committee through the operative provisions of the Bill, so I do not propose to repeat what he has already said so eloquently, other than to make it clear that the Government very strongly support these measures, for the reasons that hon. Members on both sides of the Committee have eloquently and powerfully set out. Clearly, agricultural communities the length and breadth of the United Kingdom are affected by ATV theft, and the provisions in the Bill will help us to combat that.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham said, the operative provisions of the Bill will be enacted via secondary legislation, so the principal thing that I would like to say is that work on preparing those regulations is happening at the moment. It is happening in parallel with the preparation of the Bill, so, as quickly as possible after commencement of the Bill, we will be able to bring forward the relevant statutory instruments to enact the provisions that we have been debating. That work is happening.
What I would mostly like to say, however, is that I have certainly heard the powerful opinions expressed on Second Reading, and again this morning in Committee, about a strong desire on both sides of the House to consider expanding the scope of the statutory instruments beyond just all-terrain vehicles to look at other agricultural equipment and also tradespeople’s tools. We have all had reports of often quite valuable tools being stolen from tradespeople’s vans. As hon. Members have said, that is not just a financial loss; it prevents tradespeople from working, sometimes for a number of days, which disrupts building projects and causes loss of earnings at a time when people obviously are struggling to make ends meet, so I am very powerfully seized of the need to look at that. I have asked Home Office officials to work on developing the statutory instruments to address it as well as doing the work on ATVs. That work is ongoing; they are doing the technical work to look at it at the moment, so I cannot make an absolute commitment that it will be done at the same time, but my starting position is that if we are going to bring forward statutory instruments under the Bill to deal with ATVs, why not do the other tools at the same time?
There may be some technical reason that I am not aware of why that is very difficult, but my starting position is that we should do both of them, or all of them, at the same time, later on this calendar year, so I will do whatever I can, as Minister, to try to make sure we do all of that. As I said, I am due to get some further advice on it, so there may be some technical elements that I am not aware of or some other arguments that get brought forward, but that is my intention, and it sounds like it has support on both sides of the House.
Kevin Brennan
It is extremely helpful that the Minister has put that on the record. However, will he confirm that if it proves that there are any technical obstacles to his being able to include that other equipment in the regulations, he will nevertheless stick to the timetable he just set and bring forward regulations on quad bikes and so on before Christmas?
Chris Philp
Yes. The intention is to do it as a minimum for ATVs. As I said, given how strong feelings are on both sides of the House, as expressed on Second Reading and in Committee this morning, I would like us to try to find a way to make it work. I know that Home Office officials are working on that at the moment. When my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham and I spoke to the police superintendent responsible for fighting crime in this area, he was also supportive of going further.
Grahame Morris
Tackling the antisocial behaviour of individuals using quad bikes and all-terrain vehicles needs enormous police resource, including specialist equipment and specially trained officers, because those involved ride them in a reckless fashion, endangering themselves and others. If, as was suggested, we can do an early intervention, that would save a great deal of police resource that could be redeployed elsewhere.
Chris Philp
The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. The murmurs of assent that rippled around the Committee Room as he spoke indicate that Members on both sides of the Committee agree, and so do I.
I do not want to detain the Committee any further. This is a good Bill. The clauses were eloquently explained by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham and it gives me great pleasure to add my support to that of other hon. Members.
Greg Smith
I thank all right hon. and hon. Members on the Committee for their support. The last Committee I sat on was for the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill, which did not enjoy quite so much unanimity of belief and support. I am grateful to all Members and to the two principal parties for the cross-party support that the Bill has enjoyed.
Let me address the remarks made in the debate. I agree with the hon. Member for North Antrim that we need to find a way to ensure that the Bill’s provisions can be applied in Northern Ireland, and indeed Scotland. Hopefully, the Scottish Government as well as the Executive in Northern Ireland—when it is back up and running—will look at the provisions and find a way of ensuring that they apply to the whole of our United Kingdom and not just to England and Wales.
I absolutely agree with my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury, as well as the many interventions on how the Bill’s scope must be extended as soon as is humanly possible. I am very grateful to my right hon. Friend the Minister not only for his commitment on that but for having actively asked Home Office officials to start looking at exactly how it can be achieved. Just as the Bill will make a huge difference to farmers, landowners and those who rely on quad bikes, particularly for farming and land management, it would make a huge difference if the provisions could be extended to builders, plumbers, carpenters and all the other trades who lose so much money and time as well as often their businesses’ reputations when thieves rob them of the tools of their trade.
It has been a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. Once again, I thank not only all right hon. and hon. Members on the Committee for their support but the various bodies out there in the country including the NFU, NFU Mutual and all the manufacturers as well as the police and, in particular, Superintendent Andrew Huddleston, the Northumbria officer who is the national lead on rural crime, for everything that they have done to get the Bill to where it is. I look forward to taking it to its next stage.
Question put and agreed to.
Clause 1 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Clause 2 to 5 ordered to stand part of the Bill.
Bill to be reported, without amendment.
Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill
Friday 3rd March 2023
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Commons ChamberRead Full debate Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Greg Smith (Buckingham) (Con)
I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.
Throughout the Bill’s passage so far, I have sought to make the case for what is essentially a very simple idea, but one that could potentially have a huge impact on the people and businesses up and down the land who suffer so badly when the equipment that they need to go about their business is stolen. This applies predominantly to quad bikes and all-terrain vehicles, which are specified in the Bill, but secondary legislation would enable the Bill to be expanded to cover other equipment such as tradespeople’s tools.
When such equipment is stolen, it is not just a minor inconvenience. It is not just a case of saying, “Well, we will go down to the shops, or go on Amazon and order another.” Thefts such as these can put people out of work or out of business for days, weeks or even months, with considerable costs to meet before the insurance is paid—or indeed, in some cases, if it is paid. I am confident that the provisions in this Bill to demand that immobilisers are fitted to all new quads and all-terrain vehicles at point of sale and that forensic marking—of a standard that will make a significant difference—is applied to those pieces of machinery will, first, deter would-be criminals from stealing them in the first place and, secondly, give our hard-working police officers up and down the land a meaningful tool to be able to say, “We know where that piece of equipment came from. We know where it was stolen from. We know who the rightful owner is.” That will enable them not only to return it to the rightful owner, but, more significantly, prevent its resale, taking away the point of anybody’s wishing to steal it in the first place. Let us be honest: the thieves of quad bikes, machinery and equipment are not stealing those things to use them. They are not using the quad bikes to round up sheep anywhere; they are not stealing power tools to do some DIY at home. They are stealing that equipment to sell and monetise it, and if they cannot do so because of the forensic marking upon it, they will not steal it in the first place.
The genesis of this Bill was a community Facebook page in my Buckingham constituency, following a spate of thefts from trades vans in the town. Local people put their heads together and came up with the idea for a mechanism to disincentivise the resale of stolen goods, starting with trying to set up a national database of serial numbers. Over the months since I was lucky enough to be drawn in the private Member’s Bill ballot, I have worked closely with the police and many others to work out how we can make such a mechanism work. I give a lot of credit and thanks to Superintendent Andy Huddleston, a Northumbria officer who is the national lead on rural crime.
Through consultation with police forces, including my own home force in Thames Valley, where Superintendent Hutchings leads the rural crime taskforce, with other police officers, the National Farmers Union, the Countryside Alliance, the Country Land and Business Association and many farmers in my own patch, as well as the manufacturers and the organisations representing them, we came up with what I hope is a consensual set of measures that will make a difference. We have shaken down all the things that could get in the way; for example, the original idea of serial numbers was quickly dismissed, because for many manufacturers those serial numbers are not unique. Instead, we opted to put everything into forensic marking and to include measures on immobilisers specific to quad bikes.
Those less familiar with rural communities might ask, “Is this such a huge priority?” I must say categorically that it is. Quad bike thefts have been running at between 800 and 1,100 per year in recent years. Conferring with the police earlier today, I reconfirmed some of the latest figures. Let me give a comparison: in January 2022, across the country, 52 quad bikes were stolen, but in January this year that number was up to 78. The numbers for larger machinery, particularly agricultural machinery, are even more frightening: in January 2022 there were 29 thefts of large machines, but in January 2023, I am afraid the number was up to 131. In February 2022 it was 19, but in February this year it was 122.
Such theft is a considerable problem for rural communities across the whole of our United Kingdom; NFU Mutual, which insures the vast majority of agricultural machinery in the country, has released figures suggesting that it paid out approximately £2.2 million on agricultural thefts in 2021 alone. Likewise, the Countryside Alliance’s rural crime survey shows that 43% of respondents had been the victim of rural crime, with 32% of them saying that the crime was the theft of equipment.
Equipment theft is a huge problem that we have to tackle, and this framework Bill gives my right hon. Friend the Minister the ability in secondary legislation to define the forensic marking standards that are needed and, indeed, to expand forensic marking to equipment types beyond quad bikes, ATVs and side-by-sides. I am confident that this will make a massive difference by preventing crime and ensuring that people who rely on such equipment to go about their daily business, be that farming, food production or another trade, have much greater confidence that their equipment is safe and will be there when they start work.
I understand there is some criticism that the cost to the end user will be an additional burden but, given that forensic marking costs between £20 and £30 per product and an immobiliser fitted at the point of sale, rather than in the factory, costs between £70 and £100, the cost of ensuring that equipment is safe and has less chance of being stolen is not very high at all, particularly when we factor in the expected reduction in annual insurance premiums for such products, which many in the industry inform me will more than offset the initial cost of this measure at the point of purchasing a new quad bike, a new tractor GPS unit or whatever equipment it might be.
The police say the Bill will make a huge difference and, having grown up in a police family, I put an enormous amount of trust in our police. I want to ensure that the professionals who go out each day to keep us and our property safe have every power, resource, law and regulation they need to deter would-be criminals, and to bring to justice those who commit crime. I have great confidence that this Bill will do that.
I am grateful to the Minister for supporting the Bill’s passage so far. Likewise, I am grateful to the Opposition for supporting it on Second Reading and in Committee. I hope that spirit of co-operation will continue under the new shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). With the support of colleagues, I look forward to the Bill passing and going to the other place before finally, I hope, becoming an Act.
Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to speak in this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), my constituency neighbour, on introducing this important Bill, to which I am pleased to have contributed in Committee. It will be a fitting birthday present for him if it passes Third Reading today.
The Bill sets out much-needed changes that are straightforward, practical and will, as my hon. Friend says, no doubt help to reduce rural crime. From visiting farms in my constituency, I know how much the theft of machinery concerns farmers and the increasing impact it has had over the past few years. Indeed, the Countryside Alliance’s 2022 rural crime survey, which had more than 2,000 responses, underlines the extent of the problem, with 15% of respondents reporting having experienced the theft of agricultural machinery in that one year alone. Machinery theft was second only to fly-tipping.
As my hon. Friend says, it is no exaggeration to say that farmers depend on their machinery for their livelihood. Deprived of that equipment, farmers are simply unable to work as efficiently, and their ability to generate revenue is diminished. Not only that, but there is the costly, slow and sometimes stressful process of replacing the stolen machinery. It is crucial that farmers are given support to deter criminals from stealing their machinery and, in particular, the all-terrain vehicles specified in this Bill. It is crucial that farmers are given support to deter criminals from stealing their machinery and, in particular, the all-terrain vehicles specified in the Bill.
It is worth noting that demand for ATVs has grown recently at a rate that has outstripped the readily available supply. That, of course, increases the incentive for those with criminal intent, because they know they will be able to sell what they steal. The National Farmers Union has reported that members are having to wait three to six months to obtain one of these vehicles. That means the vehicles are especially lucrative because not only are they highly sought-after and easily portable, but there is a ready resale market in this country and, indeed, abroad. NFU Mutual’s annual rural crime survey stated that quad bike and ATV theft amounted to £2.2 million in 2021, which is not an insignificant sum.
Most of us will know from our own experience with cars that immobilisers are a tried and tested deterrent. When affixed to ATVs, they make them more secure. Their value is clear: since 1992, all new cars in the UK have been built with an immobiliser and, in the following 30 years, vehicle theft plummeted by an incredible 43%. While other factors may have contributed, data produced by the Home Office demonstrated a strong correlation between the increased fitting of immobilisers and the reduction in stolen vehicles. In the light of that, the standardised fitting of these devices on all new-build ATVs and the retrofitting of them to other vehicles prior to sale could prove to be a relatively cheap and highly effective approach.
My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham has had the foresight in his Bill to consider not only the prevention of theft, but, where that sadly fails, the recovery of ATVs that have been stolen. The forensic marking he described should enable police forces to identify the ATVs they recover and more easily return them to their rightful owners. Furthermore, requiring sellers to record details of the sale, including information about the vehicle and the buyer, is key to the success of the Bill’s aims and provides an appropriate audit trail.
I am pleased to hear that my right hon. Friend the Policing Minister is considering extending the Bill’s provisions, as and when appropriate, to go beyond ATVs and include other equipment and commercial tools—a subject that was much discussed in Committee. Tool theft regularly afflicts an array of trades beyond farming, such as roofers, electricians and plumbers. Presently, the second-hand tool market is unregulated. That means that sellers have no obligation to prove the origin of their items or even to evidence the original purchase. It has been argued quite understandably that this encourages and facilitates the theft of tools. As with farmers, not only is the loss of equipment an immediate financial loss for tradespeople; it prevents them from working and can disrupt the schedule of their building projects, causing frustration to them and their customers.
The help that my hon. Friend’s Bill provides is necessary and timely. It is not right that security is such a significant concern for many farmers. The provision of immobilisers, forensic marking and recording of the sale of ATVs will reduce the likelihood that they will fall victim to this crime, which, as I have outlined, has an impact well beyond the immediate loss of the vehicle. I applaud my hon. Friend for the work he has done. I am absolutely confident that farmers in my constituency, as well as his, and across the entire country would benefit from this legislation. I look forward to his Bill making its way on to the statute book as soon as possible.
James Wild (North West Norfolk) (Con)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on reaching this stage, and I look forward to his Bill hopefully passing later today. I also wish him a happy birthday. The Bill makes important changes to prevent the theft and resale of equipment and tools that are essential to agricultural businesses in North West Norfolk and across the country. The Bill has a relatively limited initial scope aimed at preventing the theft of quad bikes and ATVs, but I was pleased, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler) just referred to, that the Minister confirmed during Committee that the Government intend to extend the provisions beyond agricultural equipment to commercial tools as well.
There is currently no legal requirement to fit immobilisers or forensic marking to machinery and equipment, although some manufacturers choose to do so on a voluntary basis. By addressing that gap, the Bill will help to reduce this type of theft. In addition, the Bill allows the Secretary of State to require records to be kept relating to equipment that has been sold and its buyers.
Rural crime, in particular agricultural machinery theft, has a significant impact on my constituents. The proportion of suspects being charged for offences in towns and cities is 24% higher than in the countryside, and that imbalance must be addressed. Data published by NFU Mutual in its rural crime report of 2022 estimated the cost of rural theft to be £40 million, of which £5 million was in the east of England. Some £10 million was agricultural vehicle theft, but it is broader than that. Anyone who has watched the latest series of “Clarkson’s Farm” will have seen that it raised the issue of GPS devices being stolen regularly, and I hope the Bill will be extended to deal with that issue.
The Countryside Alliance’s rural crime survey presented stark statistics, with 32% of respondents reporting having experienced agricultural machinery theft, making it the second most reported crime, just 3% behind fly-tipping. Unsurprisingly, the rural crime survey found that agricultural machinery theft was respondents’ top priority for the police to tackle.
As we have heard, an estimated 900 to 1,200 quad bikes and ATVs are stolen each year, and this theft is damaging the livelihoods of farmers in my constituency and across the country. The cost of that theft is around £2.2 million. After a fall in the number of these thefts during the pandemic, for understandable reasons, they are now on the increase. Quad bikes and ATVs are essential to farming and land management, and have become a crucial piece of equipment to get around on a farm instead of using a tractor, whether that is to check livestock, move animals, move feedstock or set up fences, as well as many other uses.
I welcome the fact that my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham has consulted widely; he gave a long list of the organisations he has worked with to get the Bill to this position. I am confident from the evidence I have seen that regulations requiring immobilisers and forensic marking will lead to a substantial reduction in this type of theft. I noted with interest in the explanatory notes that the proportion of road vehicles with immobilisers fitted increased to 98% between 1993 and 2013, which led to a decline of up to 45% in such thefts.
There is also a wider problem of tool theft. A report found that nearly four in five tradespeople had experienced tool theft, which is a striking statistic. While the financial cost of this theft is more easily quantifiable, it also has a damaging impact on people’s health and wellbeing.
I represent a rural constituency, and I believe it is important to introduce the regulations on ATVs as soon as possible. The Minister has indicated that he wants to do so by Christmas. While I support the extension of the Bill’s provisions to cover more agricultural and other equipment, any extra time required to develop that extension should not affect the plan to have the regulations in place by Christmas. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham for his important work on getting the Bill to this stage, and I look forward to supporting it this afternoon.
Ruth Jones (Newport West) (Lab)
I am pleased to be able to contribute to the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on bringing the Bill forward and wish him a happy birthday— penblwydd hapus.
The Bill introduces a number of solutions to the growing problem of the theft of quad bikes and other all-terrain vehicles. We know from the National Farmers Union that there are between 800 and 1,100 thefts of ATVs every year. Aside from the financial cost, which is bad enough, there is the issue of the physical replacement of these vehicles. That can take months and hampers the vital work that farmers do to feed us and provide other important things for our country; I am thinking especially of the hill farmers in north Wales, who are very hard hit by the theft of these sorts of vehicles.
The introduction of these common-sense solutions—immobilisers, forensic marking and the setting up of a registration database—is so sensible. At the risk of incurring Mr Deputy Speaker’s wrath, I make a plea for the use of SmartWater, which is so important for not just farm vehicles but all items, to discourage and deter thefts and enable the police to return stolen items to their rightful owners very quickly. Forensic marking is so important.
I do not mean to detain the House for too long. I am sure Members from across the House will join me in thanking the hon. Member for Buckingham for bringing this positive and proactive piece of legislation before the House today.
Anthony Browne (South Cambridgeshire) (Con)
I, too, congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) on bringing forward this private Member’s Bill, and on his birthday as well—hopefully, seeing his Bill pass its Third Reading will be a fantastic birthday present for him. Like my various colleagues, I welcome the scope extension to include tradesmen and their tools, but I will concentrate my comments on the original rural focus of the Bill.
Like my various colleagues, I have a rural constituency; I have many farmers in my constituency, and whenever I ask them what their key concerns are and how we can help, rural crime is always one of their top concerns. Indeed, just at the end of last year, I had a meeting with local farmers in the village of Abington Pigotts, which incidentally has a wonderful pub called the Pig & Abbot. Anyone who is in the area should visit that pub. There were 30 farmers there, and we were talking about rural crime. I did a little poll: I asked, “Who has experienced rural crime in the past year?”, and every single one of those 30 farmers stuck up their hand. Every single one had been a victim of rural crime in the past year.
The police do their best. My hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham mentioned the hard work of the police, and I know they work hard in Cambridgeshire, but it is often very difficult to crack down on rural crime. As my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild) mentioned, urban crimes have a 25% higher enforcement rate than rural crimes. That is not just in South Cambridgeshire, obviously, but in all rural areas: when the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution did its big farming survey, 38% of farmers said that they had been victims of rural crime in the past year. Cereal farmers, who make up a large part of my farming community, are the hardest hit, with 51%—more than half—being victims of rural crime. As such, I fully appreciate and support the intent of the Bill.
It is easy for people to dismiss the seriousness of rural crime; it is often seen as something that we do not really need to worry about. Quad bikes and ATVs, which are the focus of the Bill, are often viewed as leisure vehicles by many members of the public—they see advertisements for quad bike adventures, something that can be done in my constituency as well—but for farmers, they are serious working vehicles. Various hon. Friends have mentioned how dependent farmers are on their equipment to make a living. For farmers, those quad bikes and ATVs make them far more efficient when covering large areas; without them, they simply cannot do the work. Many farmers work on very tight margins, and having farm equipment operational makes the difference between making money for the year, enabling them to pay their wages, and losing money. Having proper, working farm equipment is crucial to people’s livelihoods. That is why agricultural machinery theft was reported to be a top priority for the police to tackle in the 2020 rural crime survey.
Quad bikes and ATVs make particularly attractive targets. They are obviously transportable: a thief can load them on to a trailer or a lorry and whisk them away very easily. They often have poor security features that do little to deter those thieves. Their value on the second-hand market has increased recently, making them even more attractive as targets—that is because of the supply chain issues that make it quite difficult to order new ones, as we heard earlier. Currently, it takes three to six months to get a replacement vehicle, which is an incredibly long time for a farmer to cope without vital equipment.
As such, I fully welcome the measures in the Bill to clamp down on this problem: they make a lot of common sense. Cars have had immobilisers on them for over 20 years, and it is time that ATVs and quad bikes followed suit. Immobilisers act as a significant deterrent by making vehicles much harder to steal. As my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham mentioned, this is not just about making it easier to catch vehicles afterwards, but about deterring the crime in the first place.
A vehicle register also seems like a natural step to take, as better record keeping will help put an end to the grey markets that the criminals tend to operate in. During my research for this speech, I came across the CESAR scheme—the construction and agricultural equipment security and registration scheme—which has a database of ownership and covert markings. That scheme has reported a 60% decline in thefts since it came into operation in 2008, and I hope this Bill will be the catalyst for a similar trend in quad bikes and ATVs.
The Bill will save farmers much aggravation from the fallout and cost of theft. It will be good for police, because it will hopefully reduce the amount of work they have to do, and if there are cases of theft, they will be easier for police to track down and solve. It will also lead to a reduction in insurance premiums over time, which will be incredibly welcome for farmers while energy prices and the cost of living are so high.
This and any Bill that tackles rural crime will always have my wholehearted support. We need to level up our response to crimes committed outside cities. I am glad to see that organisations such as the NFU and the Countryside Alliance, which I know are important in my constituency and elsewhere, fully support the Bill. I support it, and I hope it makes speedy passage through the Lords.
Chris Loder (West Dorset) (Con)
It is a pleasure to speak in this debate. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) and wish him a very happy birthday. I say to other Members of the House that I believe the Bill we have in front of us is an important step in tackling the crime issues we have in this country, particularly in rural Britain and rural England.
I declare an interest to the House, as I am a tenant beef farmer’s son. I believe that the Bill will benefit farms across West Dorset and further afield, because it looks to mitigate the risks that come to pass when equipment is stolen. Those who have businesses in rural settings, particularly but not exclusively farmers, have had to deal with an appalling level of crime, and particularly theft, for far too long. I am pleased that the Bill brings forward measures to not just mitigate the situation but deter those thefts.
In West Dorset, I have been concerned about theft and crime. I am aware that the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire, my right hon. Friend the Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), and his Department have done a lot of work in this space and will continue to do so. The Bill builds on the increase in police funding that we have seen in Dorset. We debated police funding in the House a few weeks ago, and I am very pleased to see the improvement for Dorset; for a long time it has been much wanted and called for. None the less, we still have difficulties, and the Bill brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham will help with them.
In the past year, we have seen 253 reported incidents of rural crime in Dorset—that is five per week. These are not all thefts of quad bikes or similar equipment; they are often thefts of expensive pieces of farm equipment, which can hugely interrupt local businesses, whether they are farmers, builders or other small businesses. It is hugely disruptive.
The most common type of rural crime in Dorset is the theft of machinery, tools and vehicles, which accounts for 43% of all reported incidents that we see. I am aware that the Bill does not include some of the other thefts we see, including animal rustling and so on. I hope that the Minister will take away from this debate the fact that I and, it is safe to say, my neighbouring colleagues in Dorset feel very strongly about those things. I hope we will see some progress accordingly.
In 2020, we had 23 reported incidents of theft of high-value farm machinery. Just so I am clear what we are talking about, that means tractors, telehandlers and other large equipment such as diggers and so on. As I said, that is hugely disruptive. I am very hopeful that the Bill introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham will make progress on dealing with that. The deterrent it brings will be hugely valuable. I congratulate him again on bringing forward the Bill, which will be of great value to all rural communities.
Sally-Ann Hart (Hastings and Rye) (Con)
This private Member’s Bill, brought forward by my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), seeks to prevent the theft and resale of equipment and tools used by tradespeople and agricultural and other businesses. Importantly, the Bill gives the Home Secretary the power to make regulations requiring immobilisers and forensic marking to be fitted to all new ATVs, quad bikes or other vehicles. Immobilisers will protect them against hot-wiring or the use of imitation keys by unscrupulous thieves, and forensic marking will help police officers to identify a vehicle easily using a handheld scanner or ultraviolet torch and verify the true owner. Those measures will make a stolen vehicle harder to sell on, which will have a deterrent effect.
I spoke on Second Reading in December, and I do not want to repeat myself, but theft is wrong, and the people who perpetrate theft are lazy. Theft not only harms the owner of the stolen items, because they suffer the loss, but it disrespects the owner and our society, and it devalues a person by deeming the items stolen more important than the victim of the theft. Theft also harms the thief, because it devalues them and makes it easier to steal more often.
Equipment and tool theft is common across the UK. Research by the Federation of Master Builders estimated that in 2019, eight in 10 builders had had their tools stolen. Tool theft is a concern for many tradespeople, and the most common targets are those who store and transport their equipment in vans. We have a problem with the rural theft of agricultural equipment, and I welcome the Countryside Alliance’s support for this Bill. It has assisted in developing the Bill, along with other stakeholders in farming, insurance, equipment manufacturing and the police.
The new 2022 rural crime survey shows that 43% of respondents reported having had a crime committed against them in the past year. Of those, 35% reported having experienced agricultural machinery theft. That was the second most reported crime, just 3 percentage points behind fly-tipping, which is another issue.
To coin a phrase, it is
“my belief, Watson, founded upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest valleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.”
The theft of tools is an issue across trades, with roofers and electricians among those most likely to be victims of tool theft. In Committee, it was encouraging that the Government indicated that they intend to extend the Bill’s provisions beyond agricultural equipment to other commercial tools. I welcome the news that the Government will expand the scope of the Bill, and that the Home Office has established the stolen goods working group.
To conclude, I support this Bill and I congratulate my hon. Friend on it. I wish the Bill success as it moves to the other place.
Jane Hunt (Loughborough) (Con)
I add my congratulations to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), and also wish him a happy birthday. The Countryside Alliance recently conducted an annual survey of rural communities’ experiences and perceptions. The 2021 survey revealed that 43% of respondents reported having had a crime committed against them in the past year. Of those, 32% reported having experienced agricultural theft, which was the third most reported crime. In the 2020 survey, agricultural machinery theft was reported as respondents’ top priority for police to tackle. That is what the Bill is about.
In my case, a local farmer in Loughborough has recently been targeted, having had £2,000-worth of GPS equipment stolen from a tractor. He highlighted that it is a common occurrence and that he has already taken extensive security measures on the farm, which cost a great deal of money, following previous thefts, including locked gates at every entrance, video cameras, motion activation sirens and locks on all sheds. However, unfortunately, machinery often has to be left in the fields in remote locations during busy times of the year, which is when criminals tend to strike. I would therefore be keen for all types of farming equipment to be included in the registration process. He is a farmer whom I have met on many occasions. He is very hard-working—many farmers across the country are, but this gentleman works very hard indeed. It is wrong that he should have to think of these things, take all those measures and spend all that money.
The Bill gives the Secretary of State the power to make regulations that require all-terrain vehicles and quad bikes to be fitted with immobilisers and forensic markings, and owners’ details to be registered on a database. On the first issue, the National Farmers Union has highlighted that shipping delays and the effects of the covid pandemic and Brexit are contributing to a rise in demand for both new and second-hand farm machinery. NFU members have reported that the lack of availability of ATVs has resulted in it taking three to six months to replace a stolen vehicle and that the cost has risen dramatically.
As waiting lists grow and market values soar, thieves are seeing quads and ATVs as expensive, easily portable, hot-ticket items with a ready resale market in this country and abroad. Thefts are therefore hitting farmers twice as hard because of the difficulties in getting replacement vehicles. The financial impact of these incidents is exacerbated further at a time when energy and feed costs are soaring. Requiring that new machinery be fitted with a prominent and visible engine immobiliser should provide a deterrent effect by making it harder to steal, thereby decreasing its attractiveness to thieves.
The second part of the Bill requires that owners’ details be registered on a database. That will make it easier for police to investigate thefts and return stolen goods to their owners. It will also make it easier for legitimate owners to demonstrate their title, in case that is required during an investigation into a suspected theft. That is a positive step and of immense importance to small businesses in Loughborough and beyond.
Last October, Tradespeople Against Tool Theft published a white paper exploring the realities of UK tradespeople who have had their tools stolen. The paper found that 78% of tradespeople surveyed have had their tools stolen, and that 38.5% have had them stolen from their van outside their home. Only 1% of tradespeople fully recovered their stolen tools. Some trades appear to be more desirable targets for thieves: 30% of carpenters have had their tools stolen four times or more.
A highly skilled plumber in my constituency has campaigned tirelessly on this issue at a national level with his campaign, #noVANber. A report of the campaign said:
“Based in Loughborough, independent plumber Peter Booth…launched a petition…aiming to get the issue of van theft taken more seriously. His #noVANber social media campaign calls on the Government to look at the increasing ways to protect tradespeople from van tool theft.”
A report by Powertools2U claimed that a van has its tools stolen every 23 minutes in the UK, with an average of 62 thefts per day. Mr Peter Booth added:
“I got tired of seeing photos and stories from tradespeople who had their vans targeted and tools stolen, stopping them from working. I didn’t think it was fair. I wanted to gather support using social media influence to try and get the Government to look at the possible ways to help make this crime less profitable for the culprits.”
The impact of equipment theft on victims can be wide-ranging, including the financial costs and the emotional and psychological impact. Financially, there is not only the cost of replacing the stolen equipment, but the potential loss of business due to the delays in sourcing new tools. The Federation of Master Builders found that over a builder’s career, they will typically lose £10,000-worth of tools and six working days to tool theft.
Alongside that, the FMB has reported that tool theft is causing 15% of builders to suffer from anxiety and 11% to suffer from depression. The chief executive of the FMB has said:
“Decisive action is needed to tackle tool theft. Eight in ten builders report that they have had tools stolen before. This is causing mental health issues amongst builders with reports of depression, anxiety, anger, frustration, stress and even suicidal thoughts.”
Peter Booth worked on his petition alongside my predecessor, the right hon. Nicky Morgan, now in the other place, and called on the Government to consider what more could be done to tackle van theft and tool theft. The petition was signed by 40, 262 people.
The Bill is a good framework, which will help farmers and small businesses. The farmers who feed our country and all tradespeople are the backbone of our economy and should be supported. I welcome the Bill and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham on his work on this topic—a very good use of a birthday.
Mr Gagan Mohindra (South West Hertfordshire) (Con)
I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), a constituency neighbour. I understand that today is his birthday. I have done a little research and he is older than he looks, so I congratulate him on his fitness regime.
First, I thank Sarah Varley from my office for helping me research this debate. I have spoken about my beautiful constituency before; it is very much a green-belt area but 65% of it is agricultural land and rural crime unfortunately remains a big issue and is regularly brought up in my surgeries and in discussions and correspondence with my constituents.
Tradespeople and farmers are the workforce of our great country and we should do all we can to continue to support them, especially through these difficult economic times. The impact of the increased cost of living is very much felt by the frontline of our economy, which these individuals very much are. Some 89% of those in rural communities are concerned about inflation and the increase in the cost of living will, sadly, lead to an increase in rural crime.
Our farmers need our support. They have a very stressful job, working hard for extremely long hours, often with very few of the breaks and holidays that other sectors benefit from. Some 38% of respondents to a Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institute survey said rural crime is a source of stress to them; they should not have to accept that additional stress. Rural crime fell during the pandemic, yet it still cost the UK about £40 million in 2021. However, costs were over 40% higher in the same period last year. Rural crime is clearly regaining momentum.
In a recent NFU survey, 43% of respondents reported having fallen victim to at least one theft incident in the last year. Utility vehicles such as all-terrain vehicles and quad bikes are essential to farmers: they save a significant amount of labour, and are used for checking livestock, moving animals around the farm and other important farming tasks. Quad and ATV theft reported to NFU Mutual cost £2.2 million in 2021, and there has now, unfortunately, been an upward trend: almost half of quad and ATV thefts reported to NFU Mutual last year took place between September and December.
I had a surgery in Flaunden in my constituency last month, where Helen Savage discussed rural crime and fly-tipping, which was mentioned earlier. The Bill does not cover that, but it remains a big issue.
I am lucky to have an excellent police and crime commissioner, David Lloyd, and I will have a meeting with him later this month, when I intend to bring up these issues again. I also have regular conversations with the NFU through the roundtable, so I hear at first hand from the farming community.
Unfortunately, 78% of tradespeople report having had their tools stolen, yet only 1% have ever had them returned. Suspects are 25% more likely to be charged for crimes in urban areas than in the countryside. In 2021, suspects were charged in less than 7% of all recorded crime in rural areas. These figures send the wrong message, and I know the Minister will do all he can to ensure that we get the right message across.
In conclusion, I once again congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham on this excellent piece of legislation. The additional support that it offers to tradespeople and farmers is warmly welcomed, as is the fact that it should be a deterrent for additional crime in the future. I wish the Bill a speedy passage in the other place and I look forward to it hopefully being warmly welcomed on both sides of the House and in the other place.
Stephen Kinnock (Aberavon) (Lab)
It is not every day that we get the chance to debate an issue that commands such a high degree of consensus among Members of the House. I am glad to say that the Opposition continue to support the passage of the Bill sponsored by the hon. Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith), and we of course welcome the Government’s support for it. I congratulate the hon. Member for Buckingham on getting the Bill to this stage. A little bird tells me that it is apparently his birthday today, so I add my congratulations on that as well.
I do not pretend to be an expert in this area—there are not many thefts of tractors or combine harvesters in my constituency. None the less, it is absolutely clear that the theft of vehicles and tools blights our rural communities. These are particularly pernicious crimes, because they attack the very basis on which farmers and tradespeople earn a living for themselves and their families. Although these are clearly long-standing problems, the need for action has perhaps become more pressing in these precarious economic times.
The Bill focuses primarily on the theft of vehicles, specifically all-terrain vehicles and quad bikes, which will be subject to new requirements for immobilisers and forensic markings to be fitted before they can be sold. Despite that relatively narrow focus, debates on Second Reading and in Committee reflected a widespread consensus among hon. Members that the scope of the changes should be expanded under the secondary legislation that the Bill enables.
In particular, tradespeople across the UK are facing serious problems as a result of tool theft, especially those who store their equipment in vans. According to data from surveys carried out by the Direct Line Group, more than half of roofers, electricians, plumbers and carpenters have been victims of such crimes. In Committee, the Minister said:
“my starting position is that if we are going to bring forward statutory instruments under the Bill to deal with ATVs, why not do the other tools at the same time?”––[Official Report, Equipment Theft (Prevention) Public Bill Committee, 1 February 2023; c. 10.]
That sounds like a sensible position, so can the Minister provide some further detail on the progress of the work to address any technical challenges that such regulations might face? Can he tell the House when he expects the relevant secondary legislation to be introduced?
It would be remiss of me not to raise the issue of enforcement. As my hon. Friend the Member for Halifax (Holly Lynch) said on Second Reading:
“The Bill, if introduced, would be a formidable starting point, but there are no two ways about it: the underfunding and under-resourcing of our police forces have undermined their capabilities for more than a decade.”—[Official Report, 2 December 2022; Vol. 723, c. 1093.]
As is so often the case, the legislation will be only as effective as the level of prioritisation and resourcing for law enforcement and implementation is adequate. On that basis, I look forward to hearing from the Minister in more detail about how the Government will ensure that rates of detection and prosecution of such crimes will be improved.
The Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire (Chris Philp)
It is a great pleasure to speak on this important Third Reading debate. I begin by thanking hon. Members for joining us, particularly those who may have been elsewhere yesterday and perhaps, in some cases, may have had quite a late night.
I extend a particularly warm thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham (Greg Smith) for taking the initiative and pursuing this private Member’s Bill with such eloquence, tenacity and ability. I congratulate him on corralling cross-party support from the Government, from Opposition Front Benchers and from hon. Members across the House, and I add my birthday felicitations to those that have been expressed. He has made a very good job of the Bill, which the Government have supported from the outset and which has received resounding support across the House on Second Reading, in Committee and today on Third Reading. It is a great example of Back Benchers, Government and law enforcement working together to protect hard-working people from various forms of theft.
The shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock), mentioned enforcement. A couple of days ago, I met Superintendent Huddleston, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s rural crime co-ordinator, and David Exwood, vice-president of the National Farmers Union, to discuss the significant impact that the Bill will have on protecting farmers from the effects of such thefts on individuals and businesses. The theft of agricultural vehicles from a farmer can cause severe disruption to essential cultivation work, as well as risking animal welfare and putting livelihoods on the line.
We are almost at the end of our programme to recruit an extra 20,000 police officers. When the programme concludes in just a few weeks’ time, we will have more police officers across England and Wales than at any point in our country’s history. We will substantially exceed the previous peak under the last Labour Government and deliver record numbers of officers, including in rural areas, where they will be able to police laws such as the Bill. It is a Conservative Government who have delivered those record numbers.
As a result of the Bill, we expect a real decrease in the theft of all-terrain vehicles. The introduction of the extremely effective technology of immobilisers and forensic marking will certainly help to prevent and deter theft and, in the case of forensic marking, to enable detection. It will make it harder for criminals to sell on stolen machinery, which will have an important deterrent effect. We have heard about how the theft of agricultural machinery, particularly all-terrain vehicles, is of great concern, and we recognise the distress caused when such property is stolen.
As hon. Members including the shadow Minister and my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) have said, there is a strong desire on both sides of the House to ensure that the statutory instruments made under the Bill go beyond all-terrain vehicles to include larger agricultural equipment and the tools used by tradespeople. To answer the shadow Minister’s question, I can confirm that my intention is to make statutory instruments under the Bill that deal not just with ATVs, but with other agricultural machinery and with tradespeople’s high-value tools. We will need to consult to ensure that we get the details right, but I would like us to cover all such equipment.
This excellent Bill will confer that flexibility. It may initially have been conceived with ATVs in mind, but its scope is far wider. Clause 1(2) will provide a statutory basis for secondary legislation to cover not just ATVs, but
“mechanically propelled vehicles that…have an engine capacity of at least 250 cubic centimeters”
and are designed for off-road use, which includes a whole load of other agricultural machinery. Clause 1(2)(b) clearly covers
“other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities”,
including for builders and tradespeople. It strikes me as sensible to use the powers in the Bill to address that equipment as well.
Chris Philp
This is a good example of parliamentary scrutiny delivering improvements. Those issues were raised forcefully by my hon. Friend and others on Second Reading and in Committee. The Government can, should and will respond. We need proper consultations with industry groups and others to ensure that we get the details right, but it strikes me as an important thing to do, as Members on both sides of the House have pointed out. Without question, it will benefit the entire economy by reducing theft—I am happy to make that clear once again on Third Reading.
Those consultations are very important. We need to get the details right, as I have said. We will work with industry groups, the police-led national business crime centre and the combined industries theft solutions group to help us understand the details. We are grateful for the expertise that those bodies bring to bear in this area.
I would like to conclude—often the most popular line in my speeches—by putting on record my thanks to the National Farmers Union and the National Police Chiefs Council lead for construction and agricultural machinery theft, Superintendent Andy Huddleston, who I met just a few days ago, for their work developing the measures in the Bill. Most of all, I thank the birthday boy, my hon. Friend the Member for Buckingham, for the initiative he has shown in introducing the Bill.
Greg Smith
With the leave of the House, I thank all right hon. and hon. Members for their contributions, not least their kind words in wishing me a happy birthday. I recommend to all right hon. and hon. Members a sitting Friday as the perfect definition of what a good birthday looks like. In particular, I thank my constituency neighbour, my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury (Rob Butler), who has supported this Bill throughout. He pointed out that the demand right now is outstripping supply, which is giving a far greater urgency to the need for the provisions of the Bill.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for North West Norfolk (James Wild), who like me is a fan of “Clarkson’s Farm,” which has done more to bring the British public closer to the realities of British farming than “Countryfile” has managed in decades. He pointed out that GPS units are a particularly targeted item of equipment at the moment, particularly as farms have moved to a reliance on GPS units for spraying, drilling and bringing the harvest in with the combine. The loss of that equipment has a massive impact on yields and on the ability to feed the nation.
The hon. Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) made a very valid point about hill farmers’ reliance on quad bikes and ATVs. I do not have many hill farms in my constituency, but in many parts of the country that is incredibly important. My hon. Friend the Member for South Cambridgeshire (Anthony Browne) referenced the Pig & Abbot pub rural crime survey. He highlighted that all 30 of the farmers he spoke to had been a victim of rural crime, underlying the necessity for the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Chris Loder) pointed out that we need to ensure that rural crime is a priority for the additional police officers that the Government are recruiting.
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Hastings and Rye (Sally-Ann Hart) for her support and for being one of the voices to push for the extension of the Bill into many other sectors, including tool theft. I have to give special thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Loughborough (Jane Hunt) for supporting me in the original iteration of this Bill as a ten-minute rule Bill a couple of years ago, all the way through Second Reading and in Committee, and now on Third Reading. I am very grateful for her support and her voice, as acknowledged by my right hon. Friend the Minister a few moments ago, to ensure that we got the Bill beyond just quad bikes and ATVs, to protect all our trades up and down the land from tool theft.
My hon. Friend the Member for South West Hertfordshire (Mr Mohindra), another constituency neighbour, made a very valid point on the stress that equipment theft brings to farmers and tradespeople. When that equipment is gone, people cannot do their jobs and earn their living. Their livelihoods are brought under question, particularly in agriculture, because when the crops need to come in, they have to come in. If people have lost that equipment, it has a huge impact on food production and on animal welfare; the equipment is vital to ensuring that our farmers are able to deliver.
I am grateful once again to the Opposition spokesperson, the hon. Member for Aberavon (Stephen Kinnock). He may not have many combine or tractor thefts in his constituency, but I assure him that when a combine or other agricultural machinery is stolen, it has an impact on us all, because it affects the food production that farmers up and down the land are able to deliver. We will all go hungry if farmers are not able to do the work they want to do. I offer my sincere thanks and gratitude to the Opposition for supporting the Bill and enabling its smooth passage thus far.
My right hon. Friend the Minister has been a great support throughout the process. I have been grateful for our conversations outside the Chamber as well as those inside it and in Committee. I am grateful for the Government’s support and particularly grateful for his comments this afternoon that the Bill can go further and that the provisions in the Bill to enable him and the Home Secretary to bring in secondary legislation to expand its scope will make a huge difference in defending our farms, our tradespeople and everybody who depends on such equipment to go about their day-to-day lives. I am confident that the Bill will make a huge difference and I am grateful to the Minister for his enthusiasm and support in making it happen.
Finally, an enormous number of people have contributed to getting the Bill to where it is now. I once more place on record my thanks and gratitude to Superintendent Andy Huddleston and to Inspector Hutchings of the Thames Valley Police rural crime taskforce. I thank Anna Dawson and the whole office team at the Home Office for the support they have given throughout the process, from sitting with me in one of the first roundtables with manufacturers, at Yamaha in Reading, to getting the Bill to this point. I thank the NFU vice president David Exwood and the whole team at the National Farmers Union and NFU Mutual for their support.
I also put on record my thanks for the expert advice and efficiency of the Public Bill Office, particularly Anne-Marie Griffiths, who has supported me so ably in getting all the details and the right procedures in place for this Bill. I thank my senior parliamentary assistant, Ian Kelly, who has done an enormous amount of heavy lifting to support me in getting us to where we are today.
Finally, as hopefully the Bill leaves this House and goes to the other place, I thank my noble friend, Lord Blencathra. When he was a Member of this House, he specialised in talking out private Members’ Bills, but I am delighted that he has agreed to pilot this one through the House of Lords. I am very confident that he will do so with great skill and ability and ensure that this Bill, which can do so much for rural Britain, for our farmers and for our tradespeople, whichever trade they are in, can make a huge and lasting difference.
Question put and agreed to.
Bill accordingly read the Third time and passed.
Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill
Monday 6th March 2023
(1 year, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text
Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill
Friday 19th May 2023
(1 year, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to see that my fan club on the Labour Front Bench has turned out in force to hear about this very important Bill. I am disappointed that my neighbour in Cumbria, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, is not performing today. I normally assume that on every single Bill going through this House, the Labour Whips have given her the job of handling some of it.
The Bill comes from the other place, and is the initiative of my honourable friend Greg Smith MP, who started this process with a 10-minute rule Bill in 2021. I make no apologies for lifting verbatim large parts of his Second Reading speech, since I simply cannot improve on it. Since then, he has had extensive negotiations with industry, insurers, the police, representative bodies such as the National Farmers’ Union, the Country Land and Business Association and the Countryside Alliance, and of course the Government, in order to craft the Bill before us today.
The concept started with a focus on combating thefts of equipment stolen far too often across rural communities, such as quad bikes, all-terrain vehicles and side-by-sides. The Bill provides a power for the Home Secretary to make regulations to ensure that immobilisers and forensic marking are fitted as standard to all new ATVs before vehicles are sold to customers.
The Bill also provides a power for the Home Secretary to extend the requirements to other agricultural equipment, such as larger agricultural machinery or tractor GPS units. However, the Bill’s powers could require the forensic marking of power tools and equipment in other trades and industries, such as building. The Bill will help to make it harder to steal equipment in the first place but, equally importantly, also make it harder to resell stolen equipment.
The Bill is supported by all countryside organisations and the police and was passed in the other place with the approval of the Government and all opposition parties.
More than 40 years ago, a significant change took place in UK farming which transformed the way many farmers operate. That revolution in farming methods was brought about by the introduction of all-terrain vehicles. Indeed, I used one myself to get round parts of my huge rural constituency in Cumbria when my legs began to get a bit ropy a few years ago. They are now a crucial element of livestock farming. However, the versatility of all-terrain vehicles has meant that they have also become an essential piece of machinery in moorland management, urban parks and beaches. They also play fundamental roles in our military, emergency services and mountain rescue teams across the country, carrying out essential functions.
Without all-terrain vehicles, many farms would simply not be able to meet the demands of caring for livestock over large geographic areas. It is a common sight in the Lake District to see farmers set off on their quad bikes to tend to their sheep flock, with their collie dog perched on the back, ready to work flat out once they get up the fell.
The level of theft is awful. All-terrain vehicle thefts in the United Kingdom amounted to between 800 and 1,100 per year in the last decade, and the trend is upwards every year. In January 2022, across the country, 52 quad bikes were stolen, but in January this year that number was up to 78. The numbers for larger machinery, particularly agricultural machinery, are even more frightening. In January 2022 there were 29 thefts of large machines, but in January 2023 I am afraid the number was up to 131. In February 2022 it was 19, but in February this year it was 122.
In the 43 years since ATVs’ introduction, ATV technology has developed significantly. Today’s all-terrain vehicles are much more advanced and sophisticated than their predecessors and incorporate features such as four-wheel drive, tank tracks, cabs, heaters, winches, power steering, electric start buttons, LED lights, et cetera, and they cost between £7,000 and £20,000 each, making them highly attractive to thieves.
Despite all those advances and everything else that is offered on modern ATVs, they still have primitive anti-theft devices. Most manufacturers of quad bikes and ATVs tend to make other equipment, such as motorcycles and construction equipment. Those are fitted with immobilisers and other security equipment, but not ATVs. Mr Smith MP found that some leading manufacturers have used the very same basic key system for 35 years. Indeed, when I lost my quad bike key, I simply used a little key from a suitcase lock. Both were equally useless, of course.
This Bill will tackle these theft problems head on. First, Clause 1(1) sets out that most of the powers in the Bill will be enacted by regulations laid by the Secretary of State. They will all be draft affirmative, meaning the regulations will be laid before both Houses and will become law only if both Houses approve. I recommend that approach to all government departments that bring forward masses of negative SIs. The most important Select Committee of this House, the Delegated Powers Committee, has looked at the Bill and has no criticism to make of it.
However, even before the House sees the regulations it is important that the Government consult extensively with constructors, suppliers, trade associations and users. I know this will happen, but I want to give my noble friend the Minister the chance to put this on the record in this House and give us all the assurances I read about in the debates in the other place.
Noble Lords may have seen copies of correspondence from the Agricultural Engineers Association, raising concerns about the cost and speed of implementation and details about immobilisers and forensic marking. It wants full consultation before any regulations are laid. The Minister in the other place promised that. He said at Third Reading:
“We need proper consultations with industry groups and others to ensure that we get the details right … Those consultations are very important … We will work with industry groups, the police-led national business crime centre and the combined industries theft solutions group to help us understand the details. We are grateful for the expertise that those bodies bring to bear in this area”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/3/23; col. 1052.]
It would be helpful if my noble friend the Minister repeated those assurances for the benefit of the House and all outside parties who may be concerned about the proposed powers.
Subsection (2) sets out the type of equipment which could be covered. Although the initial concern was ATVs, the definition provided at subsection (2)(a) covers:
“mechanically propelled vehicles that … are designed or adapted primarily for use other than on a road
and
“have an engine capacity of at least 250 cubic centimetres or two kilowatts”.
Paragraph (b) goes on to refer to
“other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities”.
In the other place, MPs were keen that “other commercial activities” should be covered, including tools and equipment in the building trade. Indeed, the Minister there agreed and said:
“I can confirm that my intention is to make statutory instruments under the Bill that deal not just with ATVs, but with other agricultural machinery and with tradespeople’s high-value tools. We will need to consult to ensure that we get the details right, but I would like us to cover all such equipment … It strikes me as sensible to use the powers in the Bill to address that equipment as well”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/3/23; cols. 1051-52.]
I am certain that that is still Home Office policy, but again, it would be good to get it on the record in this House also.
Subsection (3) sets out a requirement that
“the equipment is fitted with a device designed, or adapted … for the purposes of preventing the equipment from being driven or otherwise put in motion”,
and that a “unique identifier” is attached with
“a visible indication that it is marked with a unique identifier”.
I understand that the equipment will be an electronic immobiliser, which prevents the vehicle being moved. I hope these systems will be better than the keyless locks on top-of-the-range Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Land Rover, Lexus, Mercedes and Porsche cars, which account for 48% of vehicle theft.
I understand that quite a range of anti-theft and recovery gadgets is available, including RFID devices and GPS tracker, SmartWater and microdot identifiers. I trust noble Lords will ask me to explain the details of these things.
The Bill mandates the fitting of forensic markings at source, the details of which will be recorded on an appropriate database and accessible to all police forces across the country. There are many manufacturers and different standards and options out there, but the quads, ATVs and side-by-sides fitted with this forensic marking will be almost as unique as our own DNA. This will make them entirely traceable and identifiable to the police officers who have the scanning equipment to read and understand the forensic marking. That will streamline the ability of each force involved to work with the same resources simultaneously, thus increasing the opportunity to apprehend the suspect and identify and return the stolen machine to its owner.
For more than 20 years—since October 1998—immobilisers have been mandatory for all new passenger cars sold in the UK. Immobilisers are fundamental to preventing vehicle theft. Without the ignition system talking to the engine there is simply no way that a car can be operated under its own power. Yet, despite the many sophisticated functions of both quad bikes and ATVs, that rule does not currently apply to either.
I understand that Hitachi has introduced immobilisers and forensic marking for all its equipment sold in the UK. If Hitachi can do it then so can everybody else. Let the message go out to a minority of manufacturers that their sales strategy of selling equipment which can be easily stolen so that they can sell replacements over and over again is coming to an end.
Subsection (4) says that the regulations do not apply if
“the sale is solely for the purposes of onward sale”
to a wholesaler or another trader, and that the requirements will not apply to the sale of second-hand machinery. Subsection (5) makes it clear that the regulations do not apply if the equipment is being demonstrated to a potential buyer. That makes sense.
Clause 2 contains various powers and requirements about record-keeping. Again, the details will be set out in regs made by the Secretary of State. I will not go through the list of matters to be covered, since I think noble Lords will find them blindingly obvious. A key element for the Secretary of State to prescribe in regulations is an online storage and recording system which can be accessed by police forces across the country and other legitimate organisations. Great stress was laid in the other place on cross-border policing and cross-industry co-operation to create better anti-theft measures and deterrence and to allow equipment recovery if articles are stolen. This Bill will prevent the need to pursue the current time-consuming and extremely costly legal process by ensuring that quads, ATVs and other equipment currently stolen in the first place, or through forensic marking, are made less attractive to would-be thieves.
Clause 3 deals with enforcement and makes it clear that breaches of Clauses 1 and 2 are criminal offences, with fines from £200 to unlimited. I urge the Sentencing Council not to dilute the penalties so they become just a little cost irritant to any manufacturers that break the law. These machines are expensive, the loss to users is colossal and damaging, and manufacturers and suppliers that fail to comply should suffer great financial penalties related to the cost of the machines and the profits they make.
Related to that, I want to send a message from this House to the CPS and the Sentencing Council that we take rural crime seriously. We legislate for maximum sentences, and we want to see them used, so we do not want advice given to our magistrates and judges to undermine the penalties we have set for theft of equipment essential for farming. In every case, with no excuse, the CPS must apply for orders to confiscate the proceeds of these crimes. Criminals are stealing very expensive equipment, and a fine does not worry them; clearing out their criminal bank accounts does, and I suggest that this House demands it happens.
Clause 4 sets out regulation-making powers. As I said previously, they are all draft affirmative, so both Houses will have a chance to debate them before they become law. While the Bill, when it becomes an Act, will come into force six months after Royal Assent, not a single thing will change until the Government produce the regulations required under the various clauses of the Bill. These regulations will require a great deal of consultation, so can the Minister tell me when he expects to issue a call for evidence on what he proposes, and does he anticipate calling for evidence on just quad bikes and agricultural machinery or on industrial and construction equipment as well?
That is the Bill. The CLA estimates that the average financial impact on a victim of rural crime equates to £4,800, and that figure increases each day as supply-chain costs and overheads continue to rise. The value of quad bikes and ATV thefts reported to NFU Mutual in 2021 was £2.2 million. Close collaboration between communities and the police is essential to tackle theft. Cross-industry co-operation is crucial for crime prevention, and prevention is fundamentally better than cure. That is what the Bill enables.
Dealerships will be required by law to submit details of a vehicle’s appearance and registration and the location of its forensic marking to an appropriate database that is accessible to all police forces right across the United Kingdom. This would enable an officer of any police force to identify the rightful owner of equipment, making it quicker to establish that an item is stolen and to apprehend the thieves in an effective and timely manner. The Bill will also allow my right honourable friend the Home Secretary and future Home Secretaries to expand the scope where necessary and ensure that rural communities remain protected as the threat evolves and changes.
These thefts are largely by a globalised criminal network which moves the vehicles overseas within hours of them being stolen. There are vast amounts of specialist equipment and vehicles found everywhere, from farmyards to driveways and building sites, containing everything from power tools to excavators, all of which are top targets for organised crime. The Bill can begin to close down those criminal networks by making it too dangerous for them to steal equipment which is immobilised and forensically marked.
I have stated that the police and every rural organisation as well as politicians of all parties in the other place have enthusiastically supported this Bill. However, I am always sceptical when everyone agrees to passing a new law, since there will always be the little guy somewhere who suffers. In this case, I hope I have demonstrated to your Lordships that this Bill deserves to pass on its merits and not just because the great and the good support it. Accordingly, I commend it to the House, and I beg to move.
Baroness Randerson (LD)
My Lords, I rise to support the principle behind the Bill. Equipment theft has been an increasing problem, particularly in rural areas, in recent years and is a serious drain on the resources of both farmers and the police. However, I want to raise a couple of specific queries. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, referred in passing to a couple of the issues that I am raising.
First, Clause 1(2)(b) allows regulations to specify
“other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agriculture or commercial activities”.
That is an extraordinarily broad statement, especially in contrast with Clause 1(2)(a), which is very specific in defining all-terrain vehicles. It is very unfortunate that the Government’s consultation on whether to extend this Bill, which sounds a very specific Bill, to other equipment was launched only yesterday—although of course I welcome the fact that the consultation has been launched at all. The consultation is about whether to extend the Bill to other
“large agricultural equipment and power tools”,
but that is not what the Bill allows. The Bill does not specify “large”, and I will be interested in the Minister’s definition of what “large” means.
The Bill also extends to equipment related to commercial activities. “Commercial activities” could mean almost anything. It could mean construction, and I think it probably does mean that. It could mean things connected with the leisure industries. There is a broad spectrum of leisure equipment. It could mean things connected with tourism—caravanning, for example. I would welcome specific answers from the Minister about what the Government have in mind here, because there is real concern among trade bodies and other sector representatives at the extent of the potential application. If you are making compulsory the sort of measures this Bill includes to apply to equipment which is rarely stolen, you are adding a considerable additional expense to those who purchase it without giving them the concomitant benefit, so the Government need to clarify their intent.
It is ironic that the Government are backing such a vague clause at the same time as they are avowedly trying to reduce regulations through the Bill to revoke EU law. We could have regulation gone mad here. I think the Government need to be very specific and make it very clear what they wish to apply this to, because it has potential for enormous benefit, but it could also be a real problem and an additional cost for people across a huge spectrum of society.
My second concern is much more specific. The Explanatory Notes refer to the CESAR scheme for identification. Why? There are loads of schemes out there. Clearly there has been no comparative work so far on the effectiveness of different schemes—the Explanatory Notes say so, at paragraph 10:
“The evidence of the impact of forensic marking is less certain, and mainly relates to domestic burglary”.
This refers to a benefit that we are not sure will actually exist.
The consultation gives a valuable opportunity to compare systems. I urge the Government to keep an open mind and draw up a specific scheme only after the conclusions of the consultation. It is important that the Bill is used as an opportunity to future-proof any scheme that the Government decide to adopt. The Bill sounds modest but could be expanded rapidly depending on the interpretation of that small clause.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, I rise briefly in support of the Bill. I congratulate my noble friend Lord Blencathra on the thorough and clear manner in which he introduced it, taking us through all its provisions. It has to be a positive Bill with respect to the equipment and kit that so many often small businesses and individuals rely on; to make that equipment more difficult to steal and more difficult to sell is clearly a positive thing. The Bill brings support to our rural communities and the countryside and, through that, to our country. I support it and I wish it a swift, positive passage on to the statute book
Lord Wasserman (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the House for giving me this opportunity to speak in the gap. I am very keen on the Bill and would have been very sorry not to have been able to record my support for it at this early stage. I am also very grateful to my noble friend Lord Blencathra for taking on the more or less thankless task of steering it through your Lordships’ House and on to our statute books. I congratulate him on the clarity, comprehensiveness and persuasiveness—and his usual good humour—of the way he explained the Bill to us.
As I said in a recent debate on a group of amendments to the Levelling-Up and Regeneration Bill, it has long been accepted that the first responsibility of government is to keep us all safe. I went on to say that if we judge this Government and their predecessors stretching back to May 2010 by the objective standard of the crime statistics, I do not think there can be any doubt that they have carried out this vital responsibility pretty successfully.
Most people think that community safety refers mainly to safety from assault and other forms of physical harm. Of course, our main concern is to keep ourselves and our families free from physical harm; that is why our media tend to focus mainly on violence and abuse. But a safe community is much more than that. It is also a community where those who work and live in it feel that their property is safe from theft and damage. Sadly, this aspect of community safety is too often neglected by the media and, hence, too often short-changed when it comes to resources and government action.
The Bill gives us a rare chance to redress that balance—and just as its responsibility for keeping us free from physical harm is one that the Government cannot carry out entirely on their own, so is the responsibility for keeping our property safe. What I mean is that community safety in both senses requires more than an efficient and effective professional police service. It requires that all of us play an active part; and by all of us, I include businesses of all kinds which make up our national economy.
One might have thought that businesses would be prepared to do this without the need for active encouragement. I wish that this were true. But the truth is that successful companies are always on the lookout for ways of cutting costs so as to increase their profitability. They have come to recognise that product features aimed primarily at reducing crime are not the features that are most attractive to customers. On the whole, therefore, such features as immobilisers and forensic marking are seen mainly as optional extras and, as we all know from personal experience, optional extras are features that customers tend to decline when times are tough, as they have been for our farmers in recent years. That is why the Government, if they are really determined to keep communities safe, sometimes have to force the private sector to play its role in fighting crime by introducing legislation of the kind we have been considering today.
My noble friend Lord Blencathra has already explained the Bill to us. I will not say any more about it, except that, based on my long career of working with police forces both here and abroad, I strongly believe that the provisions of the Bill would make the work of our police forces much easier and more effective and, for this reason, would make the lives of those of us who live and work in our rural communities very significantly safer.
I want to make one further point: because of the close links between criminals who operate in rural areas and those who operate in our major cities, I am sure that your Lordships will see that the effects of the Bill will extend far beyond our rural communities. In short, the Bill will make us all much safer. For this reason, I enthusiastically welcome it. I urge noble Lords to give it a Second Reading and a swift passage on to our statute books.
Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for his extensive introduction to this debate. The contribution from my noble friend Lady Randerson has raised some interesting questions; I look forward to the answers.
The Bill seeks to help with the prevention of theft of agricultural equipment and assist with recovery when it has been stolen. The main targets of theft from rural and farm buildings are all-terrain vehicles. The ATV is a vital assistant to the modern farmer, helping him or her to get around, feed and check on stock, often in otherwise inaccessible areas of farms and holdings. Farmers have come to depend on ATVs as an essential time-saving device. Shepherds on uplands use ATVs to help both feed their flocks in winter and gather in their sheep in the spring. The Government estimate that between 900 and 1,200 ATVs are stolen each year. Where are all these going? The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, seems to indicate that they are going overseas. It is not just ATVs—farm tractors have also been stolen, along with essential tools. Direct Line estimates that some £46 million-worth of tools were stolen in the six months to April 2021. The NFU similarly estimates that the cost resulting from the theft of quad bikes and ATVs was £2.2 million for its customers in 2021.
The solution to help prevent these thefts and return property to their owners is suggested in the Bill to be fitting immobilisers during manufacture or retrofitting, coupled with forensic marking and a register of who owns what and the identifying number from the forensic mark. This latter would assist the police to identify stolen goods.
I turn to the loss of other equipment and tools. The building industry is also a target, with the Federation of Master Builders saying that eight in 10 builders have had their tools stolen. Again, Direct Line estimates that £245,893-worth—a very precise sum for an estimate—of tools are stolen from vehicles every day. Direct Line also reports that a third of UK consumers had bought second-hand tools at some point.
I declare an interest, in that my husband is a great fan of second-hand tool stalls at markets and has often bought something that he claims he has been looking for some time and will “come in handy” in the future—a phrase often used in our household. There is an app called The Tool Register where tradespeople and agricultural workers can record details of their tools and equipment and report if they have been stolen. The stolen goods then appear on a search engine aptly named Dodgy Gear. The app allows people to check whether the goods they are proposing to buy have been stolen.
The Countryside Alliance found in its 2022 rural crime survey that 35% of respondents said they had been victims of agricultural machinery theft—the second most reported crime, just 3% behind fly-tipping, the other scourge of the countryside and farmland. Wildlife crime, including hare poaching and animal rights activism, was also on the list. There are few prosecutions but, where they do occur and are successful, the penalties can be high—in one case, over six years in prison.
The Countryside Alliance supports the fitting of a marked engine immobiliser. That view is shared by the NFU, which provided a similar brief to that of the Countryside Alliance. They have indicated that the direct effects of the Bill will be on product and sales standards, trading standards authorities and local authorities. I was hearing only last week of the desperate shortage of trading standards officers, and we all know that local authorities are cash-strapped, with little or no room for manoeuvre, so we must be careful about putting extra unfunded burdens on local authorities.
There is no doubt that this is a real problem that affects primarily farmers, but it also affects other industries. I have been contacted by the National Caravan Council, which is concerned about industries involved in the leisure business and believes that the scope of the Bill is too broad. It also believes that the fitting of immobilisers could compromise the safety or use of the vehicle. As every law enforcement body across the world, including in the UK, uses the vehicle identification number—VIN—system, the NCC asks why that is not being used to identify vehicles. Perhaps the Minister can provide some clarification.
The Explanatory Notes accompanying the Bill indicate that the cost of retrofitting an immobiliser to an ATV is £150, but there is no mention of what the cost of compliance might be for other industries outside agriculture. This is a Private Member’s Bill, but I would like to ask the Minister whether he knows what consultation, if any, has taken place outside the agriculture sector. The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, indicates that the consultation has not so far taken place. I mention that because I believe there is some concern that the Bill might have a detrimental impact on the financial viability of those sectors involved in the leisure industry. My noble friend Lady Randerson has raised the issue of consultation and extending the scope of the Bill.
That said, I am supportive of the aims of the Bill. I know from having lived in a lively farming community that the theft of ATVs and other farming equipment happens on a fairly regular basis and can have a devasting financial effect on the small farms often found in rural villages. Theft of any sort affects the victims. If that theft affects the way in which a victim carries out the activities that provide their livelihood, that raises the crime much higher up the scale, and something should be done to both prevent the crime in the first place and deal with returning the stolen property afterwards. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, raised the issue of personal and property safety. The Bill, while not being a panacea for all rural crimes, would certainly help towards addressing some of the issues that farmers face. We support it, and we look forward to the Minister’s response.
Baroness Twycross (Lab)
My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to speak in this debate and thank the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for sponsoring the Bill in this House. It presents a much-needed opportunity to reduce rural crime, and Labour is pleased to support it. I thank the noble Lord for his openness in sharing information on the Bill and for the background to its introduction in the other place, both in advance of today’s debate and in his speech today.
I thought it was very helpful, in light of the genuine cross-party consensus on the Bill, that the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, raised concerns, and I look forward to the Minister’s response to them. Like the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, I would like to see this introduced swiftly, but with due consideration of some of the potential issues and unintended consequences that have been highlighted today.
This is not the first time that the need for greater regulation on the issue of quad bikes has been raised through a Private Member’s Bill. In addition to the previous work by the honourable Member for Buckingham in relation to this, the honourable Member for Bradford South raised it in her Quad Bikes Bill last year. The Bill before us today presents an opportunity for a common-sense approach to be taken forward. Labour would welcome the security measures outlined in this proposed Bill. The NFU has particularly highlighted the benefit of fitting trackers and immobilisers, and of forensic marking, and I would welcome the Minister’s comments on what measures the Secretary of State might opt for in the first instance and when that might become clearer.
The theft of all-terrain vehicles is a widespread issue in rural areas, as noble Lords have said today. Quad bikes and ATVs are a vital piece of equipment for many farmers and, as the National Farmers’ Union highlights, they are used routinely for a range of essential tasks on farms.
NFU Mutual states—these figures have already come up in the debate today—that between 900 and 1,200 quad bikes or ATVs are stolen from farms every year. This is an issue that is increasing. Rural theft rose 40% between 2021 and 2022, costing the economy over £40 million. A lot of this theft is theft to order, often, as has been noted, by organised criminals. With most ATVs not having even basic, let alone sophisticated, security systems, they are simply too easy for criminals to steal—not least as, once stolen, they are extremely hard to trace. The noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, is right that optional extras are too often omitted, hence the need for the Bill.
Currently, quad bikes and ATVs tend to be difficult to replace. They are stolen for a variety of reasons. The NFU highlights both Covid and Brexit as issues—the lack of availability of ATVs in the UK market means that it can take between three and six months to replace a stolen vehicle. They are not cheap, and the cost of a replacement has also risen.
ATV theft is also related to anti-social behaviour and vandalism, which is a particular concern for both rural and urban communities. We should note that is not only farms and farmers that this legislation might help: my understanding is that it would also resolve issues relating to the theft of ATVs and quad bikes from those involved in the leisure industry such as caravan parks, which rely on them, as well as the emergency services.
I am pleased that the Government confirmed in Committee in the Commons that they will be looking at expansions to cover other farm and construction equipment. Beyond the theft of ATVs, tool theft is a significant concern for agriculture, as well as clearly being of particular interest to other sectors such as the construction industry.
Theft is driven by the strong second-hand market in power tools, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, highlighted. She noted that the insurance company Direct Line found that 65% of roofers, 58% of electricians and 55% of plumbers had had tools stolen. The Federation of Master Builders found that eight out of 10 builders had had tools stolen, causing losses of £10,000 and six working days to the average builder. The FMB also stated that tool theft was a mental health concern for builders, with 15% having suffered from anxiety caused by tool theft. Put simply, their livelihood depends on the security of their equipment.
As the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, made clear, tool theft could also be covered by the Bill. It would be useful for the Minister to give additional detail on what the Government are considering by way of expansion of the scope of the Bill. That would significantly change its scope, and it would be useful to understand whether any intended changes would be included in the Bill or would come under other legislation. I agree with the noble Lord that details of the Government’s consultation and its scope would be useful for this House to hear.
In addition, I would welcome the Minister’s thoughts on how far the Government would meet the ask of the NFU to include other agricultural equipment, noting that agricultural vehicle theft, including of tractors and trailers, costs NFU Mutual more than four times what quad and ATV theft cost. I note the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, about definition and scope, and I agree that clarity would be useful.
The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, also outlined the need for penalties for theft of equipment to act as a deterrent. This feels entirely proportionate. As I said at the outset, this is a common-sense Bill and I hope that other common-sense elements that could be incorporated at minimal cost are included. In so many ways, this could provide additional security and protection that is currently lacking and help tackle the scourge of rural crime.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Sharpe of Epsom) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Blencathra for bringing forward this Private Member’s Bill to the House. I join him in paying tribute to Greg Smith MP in the other place for all his work on it. I also commend him on the eloquent and considered case he has made for the included measures and thank all those who contributed to this short debate and welcome their support.
I am delighted to be able to say that the Government support this Bill. As has been noted, it received cross-party support from the outset. My noble friend Lord Wasserman is quite right that the Government are determined to make our cities, towns, villages and rural areas safer. Our blueprint for cutting crime was set out in the Beating Crime Plan in July 2021, which outlined the concerted and wide-ranging actions we are taking to cut crime and make our society a safer place to live and work in.
To bear down on all forms of crime, this Government committed to recruiting an additional 20,000 officers across England and Wales by the end of March 2023. We have delivered on this manifesto commitment; 20,951 additional officers were recruited by the end of March 2023. A record number of officers are now in post, bringing the total number to nearly 150,000 across England and Wales, exceeding the previous peak in 2010 by 3,500. This means that there are now more police on the streets to tackle crime in all areas of England and Wales. That includes crime affecting rural communities, such as machinery theft, which this Bill is designed to prevent.
As all noble Lords have noted, the theft of agricultural machinery, in particular all-terrain vehicles, is of great concern. The Government recognise the significant impact of these thefts on both individuals and businesses and understand the distress and disruption caused when property is stolen. For example, the theft of an agricultural vehicle from a farmer can cause severe disruption to essential cultivation work, risk animal welfare and put livelihoods on the line. It is therefore essential to ensure that they are adequately protected. I was pleased to hear my noble friend Lord Blencathra describe the widespread support for this Bill from interested parties, including the National Farmers’ Union and NFU Mutual. The principle of this Bill is very important: the Government expect manufacturers to play their part in protecting items from theft.
As well as the personal and practical consequences, there is a significant economic impact, as noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross. As we heard during this debate, more than 900 quad bikes and ATVs are stolen every year. NFU Mutual’s Rural Crime Report 2022 put the total cost of insurance claims due to the theft of agricultural vehicles at £9.1 million last year. This figure includes more than ATVs; we know that other high-value machinery such as tractors and GPS systems are also targeted by organised criminal gangs. Of that £9.1 million, the theft of quad bikes and ATVs alone costs the UK £2.2 million. This is an unacceptably high amount.
To go into a little more detail on other types of machinery theft, figures provided by the National Police Chiefs’ Council show that there has been a total of 626 thefts of large agricultural machinery so far in 2023. These figures include large or high-value machines such as tractors, excavators and diggers. In reply to the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, the most I can do to clarify “large” here is to say that it means “big”.
This is why the Government are taking action by supporting this Bill. Despite significant technological advancements made across the ATV market, the inclusion of basic security features on machines has been much slower. Fitting immobilisers and forensic markings as standard is inexpensive, and they are readily available. The Government do not wish unnecessarily to impose additional costs on individuals. The cost of fitting an immobiliser and forensically marking a machine is estimated to be under £200. This cost is far outweighed by the benefit of reducing disruption caused by theft.
The Government are focused on the prevention of crime. As we have heard during this debate, increased policing is not the only answer. Prevention is by far the most effective means of reducing these thefts and this Bill proposes simple action to achieve that. We need the most effective technology, such as immobilisers and forensic marking, to be rolled out and fitted as standard to drive down these preventable thefts.
My noble friend Lord Blencathra asked about databases. The Government have no intention of creating a single national database for the purpose of recording and retaining this information. The owner’s information will be registered on the database maintained by the company whose forensic marking product has been used. For example, many companies, such as CESAR—which has been mentioned and I will come back to—Datatag, Selectamark and SmartWater operate databases to record forensic marking and owners’ details.
In answer to the noble Baronesses, Lady Randerson and Lady Bakewell, the Explanatory Notes refer to CESAR as an example of a forensic marking scheme. The legislation, to be clear, will not endorse any particular product, product line or service. A number of forensic marking schemes are already widely adopted by the agricultural sector and construction industry. The secondary legislation will specify the standards of forensic marking which may be used—in order to set a minimum standard, not to restrict the market or stifle innovation. I should also be clear that police officers are very aware of how to search for any stolen items using these databases. They are able to access these databases at any time in order to ascertain if they are dealing with things such as stolen ATVs.
The Government expect to see a real decrease in the theft of ATVs as a result of the measures in this Bill. The introduction of immobilisers and forensic marking as standard will help prevent them being stolen. Importantly, it will be harder for criminals to sell on stolen machinery, and that will have a deterrent effect. The Bill is a great example of government, law enforcement and industry working together to protect hard-working people from theft.
The Bill includes a power for the Secretary of State to extend its provisions via secondary legislation to other types of machinery, as has been noted. During the Commons stages, the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire committed to consider extending the provisions to other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities, including tradespeople’s tools. Minister Philp recognised that the regulations would require careful consideration to ensure the technical detail is correct. The legislation must be practical and straightforward for manufacturers and dealers to implement, without causing a detrimental impact on businesses.
My noble friend asked about calls for evidence. I am very pleased, as has been noted by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, that the call for evidence was launched this week. It has been published on GOV.UK and will run for eight weeks. I am not sure why it is unfortunate that it was introduced only this week. Home Office officials will ensure that it is widely shared with those who may be affected by the legislation. That includes manufacturers, dealers, retailers, forensic marking companies, trade associations, tradespeople and law enforcement practitioners. I urge all interested parties to engage with this call for evidence and make their feelings and opinions known.
I have also been lobbied by the National Caravan Council, which should definitely engage with this, as should the Agricultural Engineers Association and others. The call for evidence includes questions about the feasibility of including handheld power tools and large agricultural equipment in the secondary legislation. We recognise that there is an overlap between equipment used in the agriculture, construction and land management industries, but we want to ensure that the legislation covers equipment that is vulnerable to theft and needs to be protected.
The Bill is broad in scope. It allows for these requirements to be extended to other equipment, as we have discussed, via secondary legislation. That is why this call for evidence is so important to engage with—to make sure, as I think has been noted, that we do not end up with unintended consequences.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, asked me about vehicle identification numbers. The fact is that criminals are very adept at changing a quad bike’s identity to legitimise it for resale. In most instances, the VIN is replaced by false or cloned details, which can be harder to detect.
Regarding the forensic marking of tradespeople’s tools, as has been noted, the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire, Chris Philp, committed to consulting on that. Again, the appropriate way of consulting is through the call for evidence. I actively encourage all relevant stakeholders and interested parties to participate in the call for evidence.
I finish by reiterating my thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, for bringing this Private Member’s Bill to the House. I echo the thanks to the National Farmers’ Union and to the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for construction and agricultural machinery theft, Superintendent Andy Huddleston, for all his work in developing the measures in the Bill. I hope to see the Bill receive Royal Assent, as I believe it can have a significant impact on these thefts; the Government are in full support of it.
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have taken part in this short but important debate. First, I thank my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond for his short but highly supportive speech. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wasserman, for speaking in the gap. I agree entirely with him that preventing crime is a duty on us all—it cannot be left to the police alone—and that, where industry is not pulling its weight voluntarily by fitting immobilisers and doing forensic marking, legislation is, unfortunately, necessary.
The noble Baroness, Lady Randerson, raised some very important points. I know that my noble friend the Minister responded to her—he is completely in charge; I am not making policy here—but I stress to her that consultation will happen. Theoretically, other commercial activities are completely open-ended—a Home Secretary could wake up one morning with an aberrant wish to extend it to weird and wonderful things—but no regulations will be made unless there is full consultation first. Obviously, the police will also have an input.
I simply say this: if nothing has been stolen, there is no point doing the regulations. If a lot of things are being stolen, the industry will then come forward to say that it wants forensic marking too. I received a note this morning from the leisure industry worried about equipment; I responded in a short email saying, “Well, if you have a lot of kit being stolen, you may want to do this. If nothing has been stolen in the gigs you’re doing around the country, I can’t imagine the Home Secretary or the police wanting to do this”. My final point to the noble Baroness is that the regulations will be subject to the draft affirmative procedure. They will not be bounced through under the negative procedure; they will come before both Houses of Parliament. If noble Lords and Members of Parliament do not think they are right, we will be able to say so.
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, for the very good points she raised; I am grateful for her support. As she noted, £46 million worth of tools were stolen in six months; that is about £240,000 every day. I commend her husband—he sounds like an excellent chap—because I am also one of those who cannot resist buying tools which may be necessary one day. I assure the House that, once every 30 years, I have something in the back of the cupboard which is essential to fix something.
With all due respect to the National Caravan Council, the advice I received was that it may be slightly off the point on this matter. I do not think that the point it is making is relevant; it raises a valid concern, but I think that it has misjudged it slightly.
I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Twycross, for her highly supportive comments. She made an excellent speech—and not just because I agreed with it.
I knew that my noble friend the Minister would be supportive, but I am delighted that he set out the details of the consultation and the standards of the forensic marking, which answers the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Randerson. I am delighted to hear that the call for evidence has gone out this week—I had thought so, but was not sure—and that it will be widely shared. It is important that we get the details right. This is the chance for everybody in the industry, the police and so on to be able to draft the legislation; it will not be written up just by the brilliant civil servants in the Home Office. The consultation on the technical details is terribly important. All Governments are good at general policy-making, but sometimes they do not get technical details right, so this is a chance for the industry to have an input in the legislation. As I said—I am sorry for repeating this—the regulations will come before both Houses, and we will have a chance to say whether or not they are right.
I am very grateful to all noble Peers who have taken part and to my noble friend the Minister for his assurance. I will not thank everyone at this stage; if we get to Third Reading, I will thank those heavily involved then. I beg to move.
Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill
Tuesday 13th June 2023
(1 year, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, I understand that no amendments have been set down to this Bill and that no noble Lord has indicated a wish to move manuscript amendments or to speak in Committee. In these circumstances, and if no noble Lord objects, I beg to move that the order of commitment be discharged.
Equipment Theft (Prevention) Bill
Friday 14th July 2023
(1 year, 5 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Equipment Theft (Prevention) Act 2023 Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Blencathra (Con)
My Lords, on the assumption that your Lordships pass this Bill today, it will not go back to the Commons but straight to His Majesty the King for Royal Assent. I shall get the credit for taking it through this House, but I was inconsequential in getting this Bill on the statute book. The real credit goes to my honourable friend Greg Smith MP, whose brainchild it was. He was a London councillor with a deep interest in cutting crime, and he introduced a 10-minute rule Bill on this subject in 2021. Then the real work began, as he had detailed discussions with the police, the NFU, the Home Office, the Countryside Alliance, the CLA and the Construction Equipment Association, all of which played a part in the Bill before us today. I particularly acknowledge the contributions of Superintendent Andy Huddleston of Northumberland Police and the national rural crime unit lead; Police Sergeant Paul Fagg, of the Metropolitan Police and the National Business Crime Centre; and Detective Sergeant Chris Piggott.
As your Lordships well know, no new law in crime gets through unless the Home Office is on side, and it was. I thank Anna Dawson, Anna Weeden and Sarah Brade, all from the neighbourhood crime unit.
I thank NFU Mutual, which was key in drafting the legislation, and David Exwood, the vice-president of the National Farmers’ Union. I also thank David Bean of the Countryside Alliance and the Country Land and Business Association, and Suneeta Johal, chief executive of the Construction Equipment Association. Finally, and not least, I thank Mr Ian Kelly, the parliamentary assistant to Greg Smith MP.
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, has given fulsome thanks to all the people involved in the passage of this Bill. He has played a prominent role in it. As he summed up, it is about stopping manufacturers having Mickey Mouse locks on their equipment. I certainly know from my own experience that the newer locks on equipment—whether construction or general rural equipment—are far more sophisticated, as they involve satellite links and all sorts of other technology. This means they are really difficult to break. Nevertheless, eternal vigilance is needed on this front because the people who seek to steal such equipment will be moving their technology forward as well. This Bill is a welcome step in the right direction. I congratulate the noble Lord on seeing it through this House.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Home Office (Lord Sharpe of Epsom) (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Blencathra for taking this Private Member’s Bill through the House—his efforts were far from inconsequential. I welcome the support the Bill has received in this House and in the other place, and join my noble friend in paying tribute to Greg Smith MP.
The Bill has received cross-party support from the outset, and the Government have wholeheartedly supported it. The Government are determined to make our cities, towns, villages and rural areas safer. As we have heard during debates on this Bill, thefts of agricultural machinery, and in particular all-terrain vehicles, are of great concern. The Government recognise the significant impact these thefts have on our rural communities and businesses, and it is essential we ensure that they are adequately protected. These thefts are preventable: fitting immobilisers and forensic markings as standard is inexpensive and the tools to do so are readily available. The Government expect manufacturers to play their part in protecting items from theft, which is why the Government are taking action by supporting this Bill. The Bill is a great example of government, law enforcement and industry working together to protect hard-working people from theft.
As my noble friend noted, the Bill includes a power for the Secretary of State to extend its provisions to other types of machinery via secondary legislation. During the Commons stages the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire committed to considering the extension of the provisions to other equipment designed or adapted primarily for use in agricultural or commercial activities and tradespeople’s tools. Minister Philp recognised that the regulations would require careful consideration to ensure that the technical detail is correct. To that end, the Home Office has undertaken a call for evidence, seeking views on these detailed matters. The call for evidence closed yesterday, and the responses will be carefully considered before secondary legislation is laid before both Houses and debated in due course.
I reiterate my thanks to my noble friend Lord Blencathra, and echo his thanks to the National Farmers’ Union and to the National Police Chiefs’ Council lead for construction and agricultural machinery theft, Superintendent Andy Huddleston, for his work in developing the measures in this Bill. I also echo my noble friend’s praise for the police sergeant and detective sergeant he mentioned. I hope to see the Bill receive Royal Assent, as I believe it can have a significant impact on these thefts. The Government are in full support of it.
Royal Assent
Thursday 20th July 2023
(1 year, 5 months ago)
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