IT IS STILL HAPPENING — Stop deleting stolen-vehicle records
There should no longer be any debate about whether police services continue to leave stolen-vehicle records unconfirmed. They do.
Police guidance requires a PNC Lost/Stolen record to be confirmed within 48 hours. Yet on 24 August 2026 the Home Office confirmed that recently archived VE602J reports contain:
“details of each individual two-week reminder for lost/stolen markers…”
In other words, individual stolen-vehicle reports are still reaching two weeks without confirmation. That matters because an unconfirmed report is not notified to DVLA.
Worse follows at six weeks.
If the LoS marker remains unconfirmed, it is automatically removed from PNC — the process commonly called “weeding”.
This problem has been raised repeatedly. Police services have been reminded. The NPCC and Home Office have been alerted. The National Audit Office investigated my concerns and reported that the Home Office confirmed this process contributes to the discrepancy between police and DVLA stolen-vehicle records.
Yet the latest Home Office response demonstrates that the precursor to six-week deletion continues today.
So stop it.
There is a remarkably simple precaution available:
- STOP automatically deleting an unrecovered stolen vehicle’s LoS marker merely because an administrative confirmation has not occurred.
Then undertake the exercise which should already have happened:
AUDIT the records previously weeded.
- Establish how many represented vehicles which were still stolen and outstanding.
- Reinstate appropriate markers.
Then determine what happened while those vehicles incorrectly appeared clear.
- Were they subject to police enquiries?
- Did they pass ANPR cameras?
- Were DVLA transactions undertaken?
- Were they checked by provenance providers?
- Were new keepers registered?
And, most seriously:
How many innocent purchasers may now possess stolen vehicles which appeared clear because the police record had disappeared?
My analysis identified a 20,000–28,000 difference between police and DVLA vehicle-theft datasets for 2025. That does not mean all those vehicles were weeded. There are other explanations for the discrepancy.
But the NAO/Home Office engagement established that weeding is one contributor. The Home Office has now established something else:
- the failures which precede weeding are still occurring.
We now need the six-week figures to establish how many warnings become deletions.
But preventing tomorrow’s deletion does not require waiting for another FoIA response.
- Stop the process now.
- Audit what has already happened.
- Fix what can still be fixed.
24/08/2026, I returned to the National Audit Office about the issue – my email can be read here.
