Number plate theft is up 30%. Fifteen quid will fix it

Walk down any supermarket car park and most number plates are still held on by the same flat-head screws that came in the box. Yours probably included. That's the problem. The DVLA logged 7,381 stolen plates in the latest 12-month window — up from 5,683 the year before, and more than double the count of four years ago — on Churchill Motor Insurance's reading of the figures. Almost every one of them came off in seconds, with a screwdriver anyone can pick up in Halfords.

Cross-heads come off easy. That's the whole game. A thief wants a plate they can sell on, or bolt to a stolen vehicle to dodge ANPR — and your standard fixings make it a 30-second job.

What's driving the increase

A 30 per cent jump isn't opportunism. Stolen plates are the disposable currency of organised vehicle crime — a fresh set every time the original car needs to disappear from a camera feed. Hotspots track the wider vehicle-crime map, with London and the bigger urban centres taking the lion's share.

If you've got a private plate, the consequences run further. A generic replacement is £15. A private registration can be worth thousands on its own, the replacement bill is yours to cover, and the DVLA reissue will ask for proof of identity, ownership and entitlement before handing over a duplicate.

The security screw solution

The fix everyone keeps repeating is tamper-resistant screws — Torx, hex, or proprietary heads that need a specific bit to remove. £10 to £15 for a set, three minutes to fit, not foolproof — but they're the difference between a thief leaving with your plate and a thief giving up on yours to move to the next car along.

Churchill's guidance echoes what police forces in plate-theft hotspots have been saying for a while. The DVLA's replacement-plate process takes weeks for private registrations because ownership history needs to be checked. Fifteen quid of Torx bits versus that. Pick one.