Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will publish the data for dog and cat thefts in each police force area in England and Wales for every year since 2010.

We recognise the distress pet theft causes and are committed to preventing these cruel crimes

The Home Office does publish data on police recorded theft offences as part of the quarterly ONS ‘Crime in England and Wales’ statistics, but it does not separately identify the number of thefts for dogs and cats.

However, information on the scale of pet theft was gathered as part of the Pet Theft Taskforce, which engaged a number of key organisations and experts in the field to shine a light on the existing evidence.

The evidence included aggregated data from 33 police forces in England and Wales on trends in reported dog thefts since 2015 and is available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/pet-theft-taskforce-report/pet-theft-taskforce-report.

As part of the taskforce we are working with the police to ensure these thefts are recorded in a consistent way and readily identifiable within forces’ information management systems.