● Range Rover maker spends “several hundred thousand pounds” to thwart stolen car exports
Chris Rosamond Chris_rosamond@autovia.co.uk
JAGUAR Land Rover is to spend “several hundreds of thousands of pounds” helping to beef up policing at UK container ports, in a bid to thwart criminal gangs given free rein by a lack of police resources.
Managing director Patrick McGillycuddy and global financial services director Chris Kent shed light on JLR’s plan to pay for extra policing at the Felixstowe, Tilbury and Southampton container facilities, during an event in Solihull showcasing the firm’s responses to soaring crime rates and insurance premiums.
Thefts of Land Rover products have been the focus of plenty of headlines in recent months, but Kent said JLR’s unprecedented investment in ports policing addresses a broader problem affecting the car industry.
“It feels that from a security perspective, the UK could do more,” he said. “This feels like there’s a policing issue around serious and organised crime, and the port security is a real problem for us. The ability to get parts out of the ports, effectively unchecked, is certainly not helping.”
The evidence suggests that most of the luxury cars stolen in the UK, including JLR products, are shipped out of the UK in containers – either complete, with up to four vehicles per container, or broken into parts.
“The issue is really centred in the UK, and the fact we’ve got a porous border,” said Kent, who explains that JLR already tracks activity in the Middle East, where raids on bodyshops allow them to see parts arriving and being applied to vehicles. He also pointed to container freeports in the United Arab Emirates as a distribution point for cars and parts making their way to West African states or other markets such as Russia.
JLR has for the last two years operated a Vehicle Theft Reduction Group, which works closely with police in the UK to monitor and respond to specific threats or vulnerabilities in JLR vehicles. According to one group member, an indication of the ease with which criminals can export stolen cars and parts, is that the UK can muster a total of three vehicle crime police officers working for the National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service at UK ports – that’s just one each at Felixstowe, Southampton
