Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the number of arrests on suspicion of theft of catalytic converters from motor vehicles in each of the last three years.

The Home Office does not hold information on the number of arrests for theft of catalytic converters from motor vehicles centrally.

The Home Office collect and publish data annually on the number of arrests, including reason for arrest, in the Police Powers and Procedures publication which can be found here: Police powers and procedures England and Wales statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). However, data for reason for arrest are collected at offence group level only (e.g. theft offences) and cannot be broken down to identify if it was a theft of a catalytic converter.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) provides estimates of the number of incidents of theft from vehicles, including details of the items stolen, such as car parts. The latest available data is published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the ‘Nature of Crime: vehicle related theft’ tables, available here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/natureofcrimevehiclerelatedtheft.