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Host Supt Andy Huddleston – Northumbria Police

I wont go quite as far as saying rural crime is belittled by many people I speak to but it is fair to say that when I explain I’m the national lead for theft of tractors and diggers, I nearly always get a wry smile and asked is that really a big issue ? Using the national average, only 16% of the people in this room live in a rural area which I think is a good starting point for why it is helpful to set out just how serious and organised rural crime is and how this impacts upon all of us.

The national SOAC definition highlights Rural Crime and Machinery theft as one of the 9 UK priorities. Is Rural Crime Serious crime?

Absolutely and very much not just across one crime type. For example we have an OCG that steals Quad bikes and Land Rovers but also uses farm machinery to rip out ATM machines in rural locations.

But more than this Rural Crime OCGs we now know adapt in line with demand hence we have seen increases in GPS and fuel thefts, as well as for example equine crime and livestock theft, the latter I can assure you is not a job for the untrained as loading, moving and disposing of 60 sheep is a skill the vast majority of society don’t have. It might seem to be only a few sheep worth about £90 each, however this meat enters the food chain through illegal slaughtering and abattoirs. Add to this over 16,000 people are hospitalised and over 180 die each year due to foodborne disease I think you would agree is a concern and we now work with the Food Standards Agency.  

Part of a series of offending – historically we have been bad at making the links predominantly due to the very nature of rural offence locations being wide spread and OCG’s operating in ways we didn’t understand. Rural Crime is hardly, if ever standalone. 

Whilst the exact cost of Rural Crime is not easy to set the insurance data from the very supportive NFU Mutual, we can estimate the cost at over £50M but this does not include downtime, penalties and the impact of produce not getting to market. The financial cost of rural crime is significant and this cost is ultimately picked up by all of us in the price of the food we buy. For this reason we are part of the National Infrastructure Crime Reduction Parentship. 

Lastly - the impact if also far closer to home for us as a police service, there are several deaths directly linked to rural criminality but for me the most poignant is that of our colleague Andrew Harper who lost his life responding to the theft of a quad bike.  

Aside from academic research the high level of organisation behind rural crime is also becoming more and more evident through the dedicated roles within teams such as NAVCIS and OPAL ACE. One recent OPAL case identified an OCG travelling the length of the country to steal high volumes of fuel (I’m talking 15,000 litres at a time!) all based on their knowledge of a national farming supplier that stored their fuel in the same way at all there depots across the country - Effectively their website became an address book for the OCG, without OPAL we would not have made these links.

Putting the scale of rural SOAC into context recently was some excellent work by NAVCIS, working with European colleagues 20 GPS units stolen from Norfolk were located in Lithuania, each with a value of between 5 and £14K. These 20 were part of 250         found in the raid! stolen from Germany, France and Belgium with a value in excess of £1.5M. We have found UK tractors in Africa, an excavator in the United States and even a 40 tonne quarry dumper truck in Australia! (In urban terms that’s the weight of 3 London buses!) To move this sort of equipment you have to have not only a large but also skilled global network.

NAVCIS whom I have to say are outstanding, in the last 3 years have intercepted 7 shipping containers with over £1.5M of agri and plant equipment all bound for the middle east. That’s great, but what didn’t we intercept!

However, with scale comes investigation issues and we are repeatedly finding across the UK that Rural SOAC investigation often falter, falling down in one of two gaps - either between forces and ROCUs and sometimes between ROCUS and the NCA. Rural Crime OCGs clever balance of risk versus reward pays dividends as their activities whilst high financial return, steer away from terrorism, human trafficking, firearms and drugs, thereby scoring lower in terms of threat harm and risk and so often avoiding a higher level scrutiny.                      

Policing challenges

There are as you’ve heard some excellent examples of success in tackling rural crime and we are without doubt getting far better, however we still find forces, regions and Countries working in isolation. At a local level we’ve talked of individual crimes not being linked but to emphasise this same issue on a much larger scale, since January 2020 any property unless it has a DVLA registration number, is no longer shared with Europe. The loss of access to the Schengen database in the rural crime world means high value agri and construction machines that make it over the Channel are effectively untraceable. To give some reassurance we have a manual work around for equipment we believe has gone to Europe and are working with the NCA, ICCC and Interpol on an interim data sharing solution. The learning we would share is that SOAC OCG’s know this and they are in farming terms currently making hay while the sun shines! 

Intelligence sharing

At a regional and nation level there is some good information sharing but it is sporadic and not consistent, within Rural Crime what has shown great success is Operation Hawkeye, this is quite simply regular rural crime intelligence sharing meetings and calls and its working really well. Particularly between Scotland and Northern forces where it is making a difference on a near daily basis both in terms of live time intelligence and importantly the linking of offences 

NAVCIS, OPAL and ACE are crucial to intelligence sharing as you have heard me say but what we have also found is that OPAL is not widely known and I would advocate we all have a role in helping change this.

A point I would want to emphasise is the need for a wider use of PND to not only enter OCG activity but then ensure it is used in targeting these offenders across multiple forces.

Lastly on intelligence, it is not just a police responsibility, we have found both the Agricultural and Construction industry don’t share what they know and they know a lot! We are looking to address this with the likes of crime stoppers campaigns and the expansion of Rural Watch groups that are proving extremely successful across the UK. Very quickly Rural Watch is effectively neighbourhood watch using whats app and is now a vast network of the community in Rural Areas. It is in my opinion the most powerful advance we have seen in tackling rural crime and increasing confidence in the police in the last 27 years.   

Partnership working

Across the UK within Rural Crime we have found working together has time and again shown its high value and long term impact, a great example is the Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime that has membership from government, industry and the voluntary sector. One of our national priorities is to establish similar partnerships across the country.

However partnership by definition is to work together for the better – Our experience of a small number of partners is that whilst reducing crime is promoted as a priority the unspoken priority is making or not losing money and there being fewer victims of crime is secondary. Which clearly makes problem solving   a problem!     

Problem solving

Taking a more detailed problem solving approach and closely examining what is behind the crimes we seek to prevent has been a watershed moment in rural crime policing – we have for a very long time not made links as you’ve heard me set our but also not understand the dynamics of the crimes. By this I mean really understanding the offenders behaviour and motivations, how victim behaviour impacts on a crime, the influence of insurance practices on culture and also how business practice fuel thefts. A fundamental influence on how we approach Rural SOAC has come from academia and my experience and advise would be embrace it, especially when you don’t like what it tells you!                        

Shared learning across SOAC portfolios I would advocate as being fundamentally key. I am not talking just about crime intelligence here but the ‘life cycle’ of these crimes and the conditions in which they thrive. We so often concentrate on how we target offenders which is absolutely right but must do this alongside work address other factors that contribute.

For example within agri machinery theft we benefitted from the experience of the car crime work Gareth Wrigley and the team had been doing, it gave us great examples of where manufacturers were working in partnership. However what this sharing also identified was that the market forces were very different in the Agri and construction sector – domestic car manufactures found that thefts were reducing their competitive advantage in other words sales, in the Agri sector this is just not the case, a farmer buys exactly the same machine again.

Somewhat controversially but we can prove this, some companies know fine well thefts are good for business as every machine stolen generates another sale and there is a direct pressure not to address obvious failings or adopt technology where high numbers of thefts are not causing customers to move to a competitors product.  

This later issue is one we have tried to address voluntarily with manufacturers for 3 years and had no success. This has led to government support and we are currently assisting in writing a Private Members Bill to see basic security fitted to these machines in the UK brought into legislation.  

Through the SOAC board, Home Office Stolen Goods Working Group and NIRCP we have shared some of this learning as I believe there are other sectors within SOAC that have some of the fundamental issues we are dealing with. 

Can I please ask that you take way these three things:

Adopt the SOAC / Rural Crime and Wildlife Strategies

• The strategies set out what we need to do they are very clear and I would commend them to you.

Join the Intelligence network & get more out of PND

• Please do help support us introducing Hawkeye and rural crime partnerships 
• Can I ask that we use and promote OPAL / ACE and NAVCIS they are key
• PND is not just what you get out but what you put in!

Increased focus on Prevent 

• We enforce where we can but to quote a line from an old colleague we will not arrest our way out of theses crimes, Preventing these crimes through informed problem solving and partnership working is fundamental. 
• Lastly share your learning and use the SOAC portfolio leads to seek that change that is needed but which is so often difficult to achieve.

I hope you would agree Rural Crime is definitely part of SOAC, that the OCG links are far greater than we knew or understood but that the future is bright and that through working together and problem solving we can significantly reduce serious organised acquisitive crime.