The UK has over 1.5 million historic vehicles (those manufactured 30 or more years ago) registered with the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), writes Dr Ken German. Some 417,000 of them are vintage or classic motorcycles.
The country’s 248 unique historic vehicle clubs together with their 1.3 million enthusiasts that own and restore these old machines see to it that 183,000 of these elderly bikes are suitable for use on the road, albeit their average mileage is just 880 miles in any year. While some rare machines seen for sale can be more than £100k, the average for each one revealed in a survey undertaken by the Federation of British Historic Motor Clubs (FBHVC) is just £6,700.
Many of these enthusiasts who form together a powerful collective of knowledgeable marque specialists are joined in the memory that their ageing motorcycles have already lived through a half century of turmoil that included the collapse of its whole motorcycle manufacturing industry in the 1970s and a withdrawal of interest from our insurance industry in the early 1990s when annual two wheeled theft figures reached a staggering 100k in just one year.
Most will feel uncomfortable in being reminded that in the past 50 years one million motorcycles that were reported stolen to the police have never been recovered. While statistics can often be mind-numbingly boring, how we ‘lost’ a million motorcycles in half a century clearly deserves exploring.
A recent motorcycle industry theft projection suggests a total of around 25,000 motorcycles will again be reported stolen by the end of this year (it was 25,212 in 2022). Unfortunately, as in previous years only 37 per cent of them (9250) are expected to be recovered. Few will be complete and most will have either sustained damage or be stripped of their component parts.
The value of these missing 15,750 motorcycles, if applying a conservative average value to each of £5000 per machine, is over £78m which presumably our unwelcome and far too organised vehicle thieves will either bank or invest in their plethora of other criminal activities. It’s testimony to the popularity of motorcycling throughout the world that both young and old want to own or ride one. Not all can afford to do so but it remains the continued ease in which they can be stolen that has been the permanent bane of the motorcycle’s 120-year history. It’s not an unusual phenomenon as adoration, currency and vulnerability are bedfellows often seen together in many areas of theft.
While the riders and machines may have changed over the years, today’s thieves still retain that greed, mindset and ability to easily magic away a shed load of stolen bikes that will never be seen again. Fifty years ago, at a time when the UK’s motorcycle industry was in decline, the British police were dealing with on average of 45,000 (mainly British) stolen motorcycle reports annually. In reality of course many suspect machines were discovered and examined but due to the erasure or alterations made to their serial identification numbers, the police were unable to establish any true provenance and embarrassingly had to return what clearly were ‘stolen’ machine back to the (alleged) thieves.
While forensics at this time were available, they were time-consuming, expensive and not always successful; none of which suited what was then a ‘low category crime’ such as vehicle theft. In the period from 1973 to 1987, the UK had already recorded a total of 675,000 motorcycles as stolen. Some 405,000 of these were not shown as recovered in the following three years and indeed these machines are still shown as either missing or unaccounted for. As it is with theft today ,the reasons offered to victims was that their bikes were either cloned, stripped into component parts, exported or were the subject of an insurance fraud.
This time also represented the decline and fall of the UK motorcycle manufacturing industry where names such as Triumph (the most popular bike stolen in the 1960s and 1970s), BSA, Norton, Matchless, AJS, Velocette and Ariel were still common on our roads. Many of the manufacturers mentioned above would have made motorcycles that today would be classed as ‘Classics’. Right up until the early 1980s the Triumph 500cc and 650cc motorcycles were seen to be the most stolen machine, mainly for their engines. Similarly, the Norton machines with Featherbed frames were also much sought after both by the racing fraternity and special builders, a practice that was very popular at the time for those riders seeking to make their perfect machine.
The police were in fact finding hordes of discarded motorcycle frames and to a lesser degree engines dumped into canals and on waste ground usually minus any identification. While it seems crass today to think of that waste, there were the odd scavengers who collected these discarded items and ‘cobbled’ together machines we might today call interesting hybrids. The much-flawed process of registration at the various Local Vehicle Licensing Offices 35 years ago offered owners of these odd machines a Q plate, which together with road tax and an MOT (completed on its frame number) allowed official use on the road.
I remember around this period of time, the motorcycle manufacturers factory records from Norton, Triumph and BSA, that years earlier had been saved from the skips or bonfires were stored by the Metropolitan Police, to help them with stolen machine identification. These were eventually given to the Science Museum.
From 1987 to 1992 only 66,500 (35pc) of the 190,000 victims who had reported their machines stolen ever saw their bikes again; 123,500 of these are still shown as missing. While organised motorcycle crime existed in the UK, the statistics never really showed any concern around either the theft of scooters (Lambretta and Vespa et cetera) or the German BMW and Italian Ducati and Moto Guzzi machines until the early 1990s. That was when police recorded figures indicated that motorcycle crime had literally exploded revealing that 115,000 stolen, mainly Japanese machines had not been recovered.
Developments and initiatives in the motorcycle security industry helped the police considerably with the identification of motorcycles and the decade between 1992 and 2002 actually saw the annual total of reported thefts reduce quite quickly to an annual 30,000. However, while recoveries improved, the recovery rate was still a disappointing 35pc.
Bizarrely the police reduced the priority of vehicle crime to ‘low’ and began to rid themselves of their prized vehicle examiner experts as well as offering very little useful autocrime training to new officers. This clearly was not a good decision as during this decade yet another 195,000 stolen machines disappeared into the ether and are still recorded as missing. The following 20-year period from 2002 to 2022 again saw reported motorcycle theft fluctuate by one or two thousand either side of 25,000 per annum and the average recovery rate did indeed improve to around 40pc. Final figures however still indicated that another 300,000 machines were and still are missing.
Police acknowledged that many of these machines were mainly expensive Japanese, sport and touring models with a fair percentage of Italian and German superbikes when rated by the amount sold. Valuable and rare scooters, some now valued at over £15k together with the cheap, easy to steal and abandon, now make up a good proportion of today’s motorcycle theft statistics
A total of 1,052,500 machines not forgetting those involved in fraud or taken in burglaries, plus those that were reported stolen but never actually existed, together with off road and race machines (not registered with the DVLA so cannot be shown on the police computer) and those which were never reported for one reason or another takes the 50-year total to well over one million stolen machines, whereabouts unknown.
France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Belgium and Germany have similar theft problems to the UK but in addition they suffer from an endless stream of couriers, each with a proven connection to the growing European wide organised crime networks, crossing open borders loaded with disguised stolen machines which are often accompanied by forged or counterfeit registration papers of the finest quality to assist in the selling of their stolen and cloned bikes.
Authorities are even being presented at border crossings with elderly DVLA V5 registration documents the style and security of which has long since been changed. Those recovered from couriers from the Czech Republic, Moldova, Turkey, Romania and Lithuania were identified as coming from a batch of 200,000 blank certificates that were stolen more than two decades ago whilst in transit to the DVLA and although 70,000 are believed to have been recovered over the years by the UK police in their ‘Operation Drift’ many of these ‘blanks’ are clearly still out there only now being offered with ex museum items, collectors’ pieces or barn finds.
Anyone who has ever lost a motorcycle over the past 50 years should be aware that a stated case of 1987 (Jones versus NEG insurance) in essence states that you can’t pass title to that which you do not own; or put simply if it’s been stolen from you then you still own it however many hands the bike has passed through.
That of course is easier said than done however as the longer a machine has been ‘gone’, perhaps for years, then the more difficult it will be to ‘prove’ ownership. Ironically aged theft reports are not that easy to acquire from the police or your insurance company, leaving the DVLA as possibly your best bet for information.
The motorcycles, the technology and the security may have all changed in 50 years but the mindset of the thief has not. Bikes simply remain easy to steal, strip, clone or be used as currency, anywhere. Will this phenomenon ever happen again? Two million motorcycles stolen in the last 50 years with only half of them recovered is a not too dissimilar statistic to that of today. In the last decade alone, a quarter of a million motorcycles and scooters have been stolen, 150,000 of which are still missing; it’s certainly a fact we need to be aware of.
The trafficking of motorcycles throughout Europe is widespread. A quarter of a million motorcyclists in western Europe will report their machines stolen this year, 55pc of them will never see their machines again.
About the author
Dr Ken German is a retired Metropolitan Police officer. He was a Past President of IAATI (UK), the UK branch of the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators. He’s a Director of the Vintage and Classic Motorcycle Club Ltd.
Photo by Mark Rowe: motorcycle with Oxford lock, Belfast city centre earlier this month.
