Revealed: The streets where your car is most likely to get stolen or broken into… so how dangerous is YOUR neighbourhood?

The streets where your car is most likely to get stolen or broken into can today be named.  

Powered with data for every neighbourhood in England, the Mail’s interactive map reveals how many car crimes are logged near your home.

One section in London’s West End, straddling Regent Street, topped the table. 

There, 564 car crimes were recorded in the year to July – the equivalent of 1.5 per day.

As well as cars being stolen, other crimes that fall under the same umbrella include theft from cars or criminal damage. 

Our analysis, the most detailed of its kind, comes after Office for National Statistics figures showed vehicle thefts have spiralled 74% in a decade.

In the year to March 2025, 121,825 vehicles were stolen. 

That was up from 70,216 in 2014-2015 financial year.

Industry experts say the spike is down to ‘smart keys’ as thieves are now able to get into newer vehicles with iPad-sized devices that emulate electronic fobs.

According to Police.uk, which compiles the statistics from all 43 forces each month, more than 310,000 vehicle crimes recorded in England and Wales between August 2024 and July 2025. 

Of those, more than 240,000 were recorded as ‘investigation complete; no suspect identified’.

The monthly data does not break down vehicle crime into car thefts. 

Our analysis covers all 35,672 lower layer super output area (LSOAs) in England and Wales – neighbourhoods home to between 1,000-3,000 people. 

For statistical purposes, London’s West End is split into six LSOAs. Between each zone, the car crime rate ranges between 0.05 reports per day to 1.55.

In the most crime-ridden zone of neighbouring St James’s, which covers part of The Strand, Covent Garden and Bloomsbury, 392 car crimes were reported during the same period – a rate of 1.07 per day.

Outside of London, a section of Bickenhill in Solihull topped the table, with a total of 292 offences recorded.

In the 1980s, car thieves needed little more than a screwdriver to jam into the lock of a car and brute force to break the steering lock. Once inside the car, they could hotwire the engine and drive off in seconds.

The teenagers involved in boosting hot hatches from council estates wanted a quick joyride before abandoning the stolen vehicles.

Academics said since then, manufacturers have been caught in an expensive ‘arms race’ in the face of rapid technological innovation by criminals. 

A report by the Royal United Service Institute into Organised Vehicle Theft in the UK found that theft rates have risen from 2.71 to 4.42 cases per 1,000 privately owned vehicles between 2014 and 2023.

This has seen an increase in the cost of car insurance quotes increase by 82 per cent since 2021. 

In 2018, Home Office figures suggest car theft cost the UK £700m, which has risen to at least £1.77bn during the financial year 2023-24.

Official figures show between April 2002 and March 2025, 3,088,477 cars have been stolen in England and Wales. 

Many of those cars have been stolen for export. At the Port of Dover, between January and September, 45 stolen cars were intercepted before they were able to board a ferry to France. A further 31 sets of ‘disassembled vehicle parts’ most packaged for future reassembly were also seized.

Between March and May, three seizures with a combined value of £467,595 were made.

In September, a Mercedes X250 pick-up truck was seized as it was about to board a ferry.

The truck, which was worth more than £40,000 had been stolen days earlier but had been fitted with a tracker. The security company Tracker Network UK were able to alert port authorities who were able to arrest the driver.

According to data supplied by Tracker Network UK, between January and September they recovered vehicles worth more than £31m – compared with £24m for the whole of 2024.

The company’s technology is fitted to more than 2,000 police cars and every police helicopter.

During 2025, the firm recovered 1,286 stolen cars. A further 164 cars which did not have a tracker fitted were also seized by police during raids on 61 illegal chop shops.  

Greater Manchester Police do not provide any data because of a long-running problem with their IT systems.