Vehicle and Plant Theft

Detective Constable Ian Elliott, Metropolitan Police Industry Liaison Officer for the Construction Industry spoke with our Editor:-

What is the real problem behind the formation of the Plant theft unit and how was it made up and financed?

Ian Elliott  Plant crime was always a very low risk, high return for the criminals. It was easy to steal equipment and dispose of it with very little risk of getting caught. Equipment normally has one generic key and it is easy to start and move with very few companies using effective security.

Compared to the average car, plant machinery has virtually no security, no coded keys, no alarms, no immobilisers, no perimeter security etc.

Thefts are normally sporadic across the country, machinery often then moved or  exported within hours of the offence happening. Already plant theft is therefore very difficult for police to investigate.
When the industry criticise police for lack of action, they must also understand the new issues that affect the modern police service.

But of those 100-120 only one or two of those thefts will relate to a piece of plant equipment. So already, plant theft relates to less than 1% of the vehicle crime problem alone. Then when you consider the higher priority crimes that police investigate, robbery, burglary, drugs, people trafficking etc, it is easy to see why plant theft has not previously been deemed a priority.

It’s only by looking at these thefts across the entire country that patterns can start appearing and indeed the thefts are undertaken by a relatively small number of people.

For the police to have any effect on reducing plant crime we needed a National Police unit which could monitor those thefts and go out and arrest those criminal networks responsible. The only way we could have a national unit was by the Construction and agricultural industries actually funding a specialist unit whose sole remit was to do just that…  Thus the plant unit is funded in the main by the top insurers of these industries, Allianz, Aviva, HSB Engineering, NFU Mutual, RSA and Zurich.

How did you get involved with it?

Ian Elliott  I’ve been involved since 1995, upon joining the specialist stolen vehicle unit at Scotland Yard.  Being a detective, I understood the issues faced by the policemen on the street; the biggest issue being how can a vehicle be identified? The usual method is to use the number plate to identify it, then a check to confirm its identity. We can tell then if it’s stolen very quickly.

Plant is a lot different. Stolen plant doesn’t usually carry a number plate, because it never gets registered for use on the road. If it has been registered, the first thing that gets removed by the thieves is the number plate which is normally torn off as a precaution.

So how do police identify that machine, minus its plates, and where do we even start to look to identify it? This was one of our first priorities.

Another big issue for police, was when a theft took place. Frequently, the details of what had been stolen were scarce, with owners unable to provide police at the time of reporting the actual details of the machine. They will know it’s a dumper, but not the identification numbers or model numbers. Thus police will take a report, but no details are available. Until those details are available, there is little we can do.

So what was, and has been done?

Ian Elliott  What we needed to get started was a registration system of basic information, so that when an officer on the street had stopped some suspicious persons in possession of a piece of equipment, he could check the provenance of that equipment 24 hours a day. As a result, we devised the CESAR system. Part 1 of that project is installed and it has met with the approval of both the construction industry and the insurance industry; especially in London, where it has taken-off, which was great to see.

My job as a crime prevention officer is exactly what it says on the tin! My primary aim has to be to reduce crime and to stop that expensive excavator being stolen in the first place. By designing out the crime, to make it more and more difficult to steal can only reduce thefts and the on-going costs. Who pays for plant theft at the end of the day? A digger, value £16,000 to £20,000 hired to dig a gas main (say) which goes astray, the cost of that loss is eventually factored into our gas bills. That’s why my gas bill has gone through the roof! So as a policeman I sit and think, no, that’s not right and something has got to be done about it. Careful approaches were made to members of the insurance industry with an invitation to sit down and talk about plant theft prevention and Thatcham was the place to do it.

Why Thatcham and what is this 5 star rating?

Ian Elliott  It is a fact that the theft of private cars dropped dramatically soon after the motor and insurance industries worked together to ‘design in’ anti theft devices (it was possible to open a Cortina with a flat sided screwdriver… it can still be done with most excavators). So we decided to start with the standards used to reduce car crime. We found that almost every manufacturer used exactly the same ignition key... utter madness!

By working together with the Construction Industry, understanding their needs and the world renowned Thatcham Vehicle Security department to design in systems which would altogether reduce costs for all was the way forward. Eventually the outcome was an agreement we now call a Thatcham Five Star Rating. This is the world’s first security standards for plant equipment which every manufacturer is invited for their new machines to be tested and awarded a Thatcham rating.

There is an ascending order of Star Awards covering CESAR: unique ignition keys or keypad systems, immobilisation, perimeter security and after theft tracking systems. In all, we are looking into the future and developing the standards accordingly. The insurance companies have really woken-up and we shall see some figures concerning both premium and excess reductions, to be released within the next few weeks, that may pleasantly surprise some people. Who knows, my gas bill might even go down one day!

The plant unit has been working for nearly a year now! We’ve arrested loads of criminals and put a few of them away! We’ve recovered millions of pounds worth of stolen property and recovered more value in stolen property in our first week of operations than the entire cost of funding the unit for the entire year! As a result, I’m hoping the insurance industry will continue to support us in the future.

We can still go from strength to strength and protect your readers from theft in the future.

Thank you for speaking to PIR Construction