Transport Insights

A transport minister has tried to quash the story that British Transport Police (BTP) will not investigate bike thefts outside stations where the bicycle has been left for more than two hours.

BTP have themselves tried a few times to counter the story, which appears to have first appeared in a report earlier this month from the BBC’s Tom Edwards.

Critics say the BTP policy means those facilities are not secure and theft has effectively been decriminalised.

The BTP said: “The more time our officers spend reviewing CCTV… the less time they have available for patrolling railway stations and trains, investigating crimes which cause the most harm.”

The problem with the story is that even though the online version had a shot of a document headed “Volume Crime Assessment Factors” that referred to “if the cycle has been left outside the location for over 2 hours”, it wasn’t clear whether this was fully determinative, or, as the word suggests, a factor to be taken into account.

A few days later, BTP issued a statement to “clarify” the issue, claiming that while it had issued statements and shared its policy with media outlets, “some reporting has been inaccurate”.

That morning, Assistant Chief Constable Ian Drummond-Smith appeared on the Today programme (from 2.43.45) “to try to clarify the situation and help contextualise the policy which has been implemented since August 2024”.

He did his best, I’m sure, but it was one of those interviews where the presenter’s apparent inability to grasp what he was saying may have led to confusion rather than clarification.

The gist of BPT’s position is that two hours is roughly the amount of time that officers might review of CCTV footage, not the length of time a bike is left.

What probably reconciles this with the reference to 2 hours in the BTP “factors” document is the explanation that it’s probably only worth doing this if you have an idea which two-hour period (if any) it might be fruitful to watch.

Now transport minister Simon Lightwood has answered a question on the issue from fellow Labour MP Chris Bloore:

I would like to reassure you that the BTP have not taken the decision to stop investigating bike theft that cannot be narrowed to a two-hour window, which was reported in the media. The BTP’s screening policy, introduced in August 2024, takes into account factors including the possible time window an incident could have taken place in, but also the availability of witnesses and CCTV, the realistic prospect of a successful outcome, and a range of other factors. In some instances this may mean that an investigation is not progressed, but there is no blanket ruling and each case is judged on its own merits.

That’s the theory, but my hunch is that many police officers will interpret the “each case on its own merits” as a blanket policy.