Police step up campaign to stop rise in festive road freight theft

Police are urging drivers to report suspicious activity in laybys and lorry parks along the some of the county’s major routes, including the A1, A19 and A66, after a spate of thefts from vehicles parked overnight.

Over the past six months there have been 27 reports of theft from HGVs across the county - with nine of them in the Hambleton and Richmondshire area alone.

In a bid to tackle the rise, Hambleton and Richmondshire Community Safety Partnership has joined forces with North Yorkshire Police for the festive crackdown.

Patrols will be stepped up in the run up to Christmas Day and high visibility posters will go on display across the county informing people on how to report suspicious activity.

Sgt John Lumbard, from North Yorkshire Road Traffic Police, said that extra vigilance is needed at all times, but particularly in the run up to Christmas.

“We are seeing an increase in the number of thefts from vehicles parked overnight and urge everyone to tell us if they see anything suspicious or out of the ordinary,” he said. “Vehicles are carrying a huge amount of stock at this time of the year and are seen as easy pickings for these thieves. We are working together to beat them but need everyone’s help – especially the drivers.”

Chrys Rampley, manager of security at the Road Haulage Association, said there was a marked increase in thefts as Christmas approached due the goods being lucrative when resold on the black market, as well as being easy to move.

She said: “We will particularly see an increase in the number of games consoles stolen, such as X-Boxes and Play Stations.

“The problem is they are easy pickings. We have seen a spate in these thefts down the A1 corridor in particular due to a lack of secure places to park and drivers are parking in laybys so they are vulnerable.

“We put out a message to drivers to think about where they are parking and recommend they park in a secure lorry park and if that isn’t possible to park in well-lit laybys.”

In April police launched an initiative to clamp down on organised gangs targeting lorry drivers to steal their fuel and rogue haulage operators pushing drivers to the brink of exhaustion.

North Yorkshire Police began running a series of monthly meetings with lorry drivers at Barton truck stop, off the A1 near Scotch Corner, which tens of thousands of heavy goods vehicles travel through every day.

The initiative was pioneered by police in Germany a decade ago and is known as a Stammtisch, meaning get-together.

With spiralling fuel prices sparking a worrying rise in drivers being targeted by thieves and growing concerns that rogue Eastern European haulage operators are forcing their drivers to stay behind the wheel for potentially lethal amounts of time, North Yorkshire Police decided to introduce it into the county.

The initiative has seen a network of informants on the roads established to report illegal operators.

It comes following a rise in trucks from Eastern Europe coming to England with their tachographs – devices which record speed and the number of hours worked – being falsified so they can keep going beyond European Union safety regulations.

In May the Yorkshire Post revealed that Yorkshire had become Britain’s hot spot for criminal gangs targeting trucks and lorries as incidents of HGV thefts surged to record levels in the region.

Road freight crime currently costs the UK more than £50m a year, and HGV thefts are on the increase across the country as gangs increasingly steal vehicles to order and to ship parts abroad.