UK Vehicle Theft by City: What the Police Data Actually Shows (2026)

Most "most stolen cars" content online is recycled from the same two or three secondary sources, some of them years old. We went to the police forces directly, filed and reviewed Freedom of Information disclosures, and pulled the most recent city or force-level vehicle theft figures we could actually verify. Here's what we found, city by city, with the caveats that matter.

The numbers

City	Force area	Figure	Period
London	Metropolitan Police	33,373 vehicles stolen	Feb 2024–Jan 2025
Manchester	Greater Manchester Police	5,605 theft/unauthorised taking offences	Apr 2024–Mar 2025
Birmingham	West Midlands Police	5,349 theft of motor vehicle offences	Calendar 2025
Sheffield	South Yorkshire Police	4,547 vehicle theft offences	Mar 2025–Mar 2026
Glasgow	Police Scotland	854 recorded offences (299 detected)	Calendar 2022
Edinburgh	Police Scotland	709 recorded offences (145 detected)	Calendar 2022
Leeds	West Yorkshire Police	1,093 stolen cars	Calendar 2025

Every figure links to its original source on the relevant city's installation page, where you'll also find the exact FOI reference number and the date we accessed it.

The caveat that matters most: not every figure is city-specific

A few of these are genuinely city-level, meaning the force itself broke the number down to that city specifically: Birmingham and Leeds. London's Met Police area closely matches the city boundary, so that one's about as close to city-level as policing geography gets in the UK.

The rest are force-wide, covering a broader area than the city named:

• Manchester's figure covers all 10 Greater Manchester boroughs, not the city of Manchester alone.
• Sheffield's figure covers South Yorkshire as a whole, Sheffield, Rotherham, Barnsley and Doncaster together. South Yorkshire Police's disclosure didn't break this one down further.
• Glasgow and Edinburgh both use Police Scotland's divisional geography, which is broader than the city itself, and the most recent division-level breakdown we could locate for either was from 2022. More recent figures may exist on Police Scotland's public performance dashboard, but weren't available in a clean, citable form at the time of writing.

We've flagged each of these on the relevant city page too. A number that looks precise but is actually describing a much bigger area isn't useful, so we'd rather tell you exactly what it does and doesn't cover.

Where we came up short

Bristol, Liverpool and Nottingham don't have a figure here. Not because vehicle theft isn't a problem in those cities, but because we couldn't locate a recent, clean, city-specific number from the relevant force (Avon and Somerset, Merseyside, and Nottinghamshire Police respectively) within the FOI disclosure logs available to us. Older or county-wide figures exist, but didn't meet our own bar for what's worth publishing. We'll update this if that changes.

Why this matters if you're deciding whether to bother

However you cut the geography, the pattern is the same: thousands of vehicles a year, in every major UK city we could get a clean figure for. Manchester alone, even after a reported 26% year-on-year fall, is still losing more than 15 vehicles a day. Most of this is relay theft: a car parked on the street, keyless entry, and a signal amplifier doing the rest in under a minute.

A Ghost Immobiliser doesn't stop someone unlocking your car. It stops the engine starting once they're in, which is the part relay theft actually depends on.

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