The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) has found a “large disparity” in rural crime team funding, with some UK rural crime teams receiving £900,000, and others £1,250.
CLA compiled Freedom of Information (FOI) responses from 20 police forces in the UK, having originally reached out to 36.
The findings also revealed that five forces have no rural crime team, with eight having less than 10 dedicated rural officers.
Lack of equipment is an issue for rural crime teams, with at least three forces without torches, six without automatic number-plate recognition (ANPR), three without drones and three with just one drone.
CLA said rural crime teams have to face a “postcode lottery” when it comes to funding.
While Cambridgeshire has a budget of £961,830, Leicestershire Police’s rural crime team receives £1,250, and Northamptonshire’s team receives no internal funding.
CLA president Victoria Vyvyan said the findings show that the UK’s rural policing system is in crisis.
“There’s no serious national coordination, measurement, or even basic kit, to tackle surging rural crime.
“All forces need a rural crime equipment pack, including torches. We can’t expect police officers to tackle crime in the dark. And rural crime will remain unseen without proper tagging systems, backed by central funding and coordination,” she said.
“People living in the countryside feel treated like second class citizens by law enforcement. They need assurances, in this general election and beyond, that this cannot go on.”
Lack of resources
Cleveland, Derbyshire and Lancashire reported no high-powered torches in their inventory, while South Yorkshire have two high-power torches between 85 officers and Gwent two across its entire rural crime team.
Six forces including North Wales, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire are going without equipment like mobile ANPR cameras, which allow officers to capture number plates and check them against vehicles of interest databases.
Cleveland also have no 4×4 vehicles or rural drone surveillance kits, while three forces including Northamptonshire, Gwent and South Yorkshire have only one drone.
North Wales and Cleveland have no thermal spotters, which allow police to detect criminals in the dark, while three forces including South Yorkshire, Gwent and Derbyshire have one in their inventory.
Wiltshire and Cheshire forces said they are unable to report inventory because the information is not held centrally.
CLA is calling on political parties to issue a standard rural crime equipment pack to every rural force, alongside training, to be funded centrally and reviewed annually.
Rural crime officers
Five forces have no dedicated rural officers or rural crime team, including Durham, Nottingham, West Yorkshire, Norfolk and Cleveland.
Where forces do have rural crime units, they represent a small proportion of the overall force, the CLA said.
Of those who responded, South Yorkshire has the largest number of rural officers at 92. However, the number of officers working for the force overall stands at 3,000.
Leicestershire has eight dedicated rural officers out of a force of 2,252, while Suffolk has four out of 1,352 officers and Wiltshire five out of 1,225 officers.
Of the forces who responded, the majority have no policy in place to stop rural officers being pulled into urban issues, or minimum ringfenced resources for rural policing.
CLA is calling on political parties to develop a fixed Service Level Agreement, with appropriate and ringfenced resources, to protect rural communities from crime.
Tags for crime teams
Forces including Dorset, Wiltshire, Gwent, and North Wales do not have tags for tracking rural crimes including hare coursing, poaching, fly tipping, and GPS and machinery theft.
CLA said this means officers must search records manually, limiting their ability to track trends, locate serial offenders, co-ordinate with other forces and target these crimes effectively.
Of the forces tracking these crimes, CLA said they were poorly attended by officers.
Leicestershire reported 55 fly-tipping cases in the past year, but only three were attended by officers, while West Yorkshire reported 47 poaching cases, with less than half (22) attended by officers.
To address this, CLA is calling on the next government to invest in universal data standards and tags to enable joined-up policing, early awareness of trends, identification of target areas or crime types, and inform day-to-day policing operations and objectives.
Response times
CLA said numerous forces are taking a significant amount of time to respond to 999 calls graded “immediate” – where there is a danger to life or immediate threat of violence.
In rural areas in Nottingham, the average response time is 26 minutes, well over its 20-minute target.
In Leicestershire the average response time is 22 minutes, compared to 16 minutes for urban areas.
In Bedfordshire, rural communities are waiting 27 minutes on average for officers to arrive at the scene, while in South Cambridgeshire the median response time is 26 minutes.
