Cardiff's vehicle crime more than doubles as 16,000 crimes hit UK town centres in a year
New analysis of street-level police records puts Cardiff top of the UK's town-centre vehicle crime table — up 145% year-on-year — with Norwich, Portsmouth and Hull leading per-resident rates.
The headline numbers
16,251 vehicle crimes were recorded within a mile of 34 UK town centres in the twelve months to June 2026, according to our analysis of street-level police records published via data.police.uk. Cardiff tops the raw table with 1,210 offences — and its most recent quarter is up 145% on the same period a year earlier, the sharpest rise of any centre we track.
Birmingham (1,042) and Nottingham (986) complete the top three by volume. Adjusted for scale, the pattern shifts: our companion analysis of collision and population data shows smaller centres often carry heavier per-resident burdens.
The streets named
Because the underlying records are street-level, the analysis names the worst locations in every town — from Glossop Road in Cardiff to Bradford Street in Birmingham. The full league table, per-town pages and downloadable data are free to explore, and the dataset refreshes automatically every month.
About this data
Source: police-published street-level records (data.police.uk), vehicle crime category, within one mile of each town centre, July 2025 to June 2026. Locations are police-anonymised snap points. Scotland is not covered and Greater Manchester is excluded for known publication gaps. Full methodology at swiftassistuk.co.uk/methodology.
Explore the full vehicle crime league table
Journalists: this analysis is free to reuse with a link to the source page. Underlying data, methodology and CSVs: the data hub.
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