Theft of Mobile Telephones

Lord Hogan-Howe Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes a very interesting suggestion. As I have already said, we are working with mobile phone companies to look at what is in the interests of preventing crime, while at the same time ensuring that users and consumers can use their phones in an appropriate way. I will look at that suggestion. We have a further meeting with the phone companies in around three months to report back on what action they have taken to date in relation to those issues, and we will certainly examine that for her.

[Lord Hogan-Howe (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, is right, that design is the way to prevent the thing, once stolen, being valuable, so that there is therefore no point in stealing it. This morning, I was out with the excellent cycling enforcement team in the City of London, who were enforcing cycling legislation. More importantly, they told me about having recently arrested a mobile phone thief who had 24 phones with him. Given that the thieves are getting rid of them very quickly, either abroad or because they do not want to be caught with them, I wonder whether the statistics that show how many phones are getting stolen are accurate.

In the City, there are probably two phones stolen per day, according to the crime stats. This is one indication—but there are many—that the crime stats are not representative, because people are not reporting it, perhaps because they are not sure they are going to get a reaction from the cops, but sometimes because they just do not need to. However, how much of this crime is out there, and that we are not able to stop it, is a worry.

[Lord Hanson of Flint (Lab)]

One of the first things that anybody who is a victim of crime should do is report that crime, because we cannot act unless we know the level of crime and the impact of it in the first place. That is important. The noble Lord is also right that designing out the potential for this activity in the building of resilient phones that cannot be used post crime is the best way forward. There have been innovations by a number of phone companies on that, but certainly there is more that can be done.

We want to help to support CCTV, and to take measures such as the incident warrant and on neighbourhood policing. In the long term, we will work with companies to ensure that we design out crime, and we will look at the market for broken-up, exported or resold phones in the United Kingdom. That intelligence-led policing will help to have a great impact on the current 146,000 thefts from a person last year, up 22%, of which mobile phone thefts were approximately half that figure.