Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to help support police forces in addressing rural crime.

Our police reforms will end the postcode lottery of provision by setting central targets, increasing transparency so people can see how their force is performing, and taking robust action where forces are not performing.

With our Neighbourhood Policing Guarantee every neighbourhood, rural or urban, now gets a named contactable officer and a response to non-urgent queries in 72 hours.

Every rural area will be covered by a Local Policing Area under a commander responsible for emergency response, local crime investigation and neighbourhood policing. They will be set targets to ensure they answer 90% of 999 calls within 10 seconds and attend 90% of the most serious incidents within 15 minutes in urban area or 20 minutes in rural areas.

We are ensuring forces have the tools and resources they need to deal with rural crime like equipment theft and livestock rustling. We are on track to deliver an additional 3,000 neighbourhood officers by March.

We are equipping those officers with tougher measures to clamp down on equipment theft and anti-social behaviour, and to prevent farm theft and fly-tipping. We are finally implementing the Equipment Theft Act, which will make it harder to steal All-Terrain Vehicles and GPS units used in an agricultural setting and easier for the police to identify the owners when such items are recovered.

We are ensuring the police have the capability to pursue the organised criminal gangs behind some rural crime. This financial year the Home Office has provided the first Government funding since 2023 for the National Rural Crime Unit (£365,000) as well as continuing funding for the National Wildlife Crime Unit (£450,000) to help them target organised crime groups stealing farm equipment and to disrupt networks exploiting endangered species in the UK and abroad.