Plant theft recovery doubles over past year

The Plant & Agricultural National Intelligence Unit (PANIU) has more than doubled the recovery rate of stolen plant in its first year and recorded almost 5,700 items of stolen kit worth more than £50m, DC Ian Elliott told the CITS conference at JCB earlier this week.

The unit has helped improve the recovery rate from 5% to 12% (over 28% on Cesar-marked items) with more than 650 machines worth an estimated £6.5m recovered in the past year - for which Elliott said there is no charge to the owner or insurance company. He also announced that PANIU's stolen plant database will be available to police forces around the country 24/7 through Datatag and, as most stolen plant is exported, circulated through Interpol.

He also announced extra resources for the unit, with a police officer stationed at the Port of Southampton and five police chairpeople in the English regions to reinforce the plant theft message.

During the year, PANIU discovered criminals' vehicles painted in the liveries of legitimate plant-owning companies and noted a rise in deception thefts where thieves clone the identity of an individual or company to hire plant, which then disappears along with the perpetrators. To counter this, Elliott announced the formation of a fraud alert service in conjunction with the Construction Plant-hire Association and urged plant owners to be especially diligent when dealing with new customers.

He highlighted suspected incidents of fake thefts, where the owner may have sold the equipment aboard before reporting it stolen. There are also suspected incidents of criminals hiring a piece of equipment and changing its identity in order to secure finance or insurance, before off-hiring the equipment and disappearing with the loan or claiming the machine had been stolen.