Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department has made an assessment of the impact on business of freight crime in (a) England and (b) the West Midlands; and if she will undertake an assessment of trends in the level of freight crime in (i) England and (ii) the West Midlands.

This Government understands the significant and damaging impact freight crime has on businesses and drivers and we are carefully monitoring the increases in its frequency. The experience of cargo theft, where criminals are ripping the sides of lorries and taking the goods inside, is a highly alarming one for dedicated HGV drivers to go through, and the Government is committed to tackling this crime, and protecting those drivers.

We will continue to work with law enforcement agencies and other stakeholders towards those ends, and I recently met with Rachel Taylor MP, and Lilian Greenwood, Minister for the Future of Roads at the Department for Transport (DfT), specifically to discuss freight crime. The DfT also hosts the Freight Council, which regularly discusses crime against freight companies, and which is attended by Home Office officials to engage with the sector on this issue.

We also recognise the strong links between freight crime and serious, organised crime, which is a major threat to our country’s national security and prosperity and is estimated to cost the UK at least £47 billion annually. This Government is committed to tackling serious and organised crime in all its forms, and we are continuing to work closely with Opal, the police’s national intelligence unit focused on serious organised acquisitive crime, which has multiple thematic desks, including a vehicle crime intelligence desk which covers freight crime.

As well as wider offence data, the Home Office collects and publishes data on specific crimes affecting commercial business premises in England and Wales, including premises in the Transport, Accommodation and Food sector, as part of the Commercial Victimisation Survey (CVS). Neither data source currently provides the level of detail necessary to separately identify freight crimes, or the number of offences taking place in different regions.