Last week my car was broken into for the second time in four months. At least this time he (or she) didn’t jemmy the door open; they just broke the rear quarter light window on the driver's side and then pulled off the fascia, ripped all the wiring out and wrecked the ignition lock.
The woman from SOCO (I’ve always wanted to write that, being an avid watcher of every cop show on TV: it means Scene of Crimes Office) said they had obviously targeted the car (it’s a nine-year-old Golf VR6, hardly valuable) but while she didn’t say they had no chance of catching the culprits, she did point out they had been wearing gloves.
It’s not a company car (it used to be, but then Gordon Brown changed the rules) but I use it for business and the inconvenience of waiting for assessment before I can get the insurance company’s courtesy car is irritating, as is the fact that, through no fault of my own, I have lost the protection on my no claims bonus, so that although next year’s premium has actually gone down, it will shoot up if I claim again.
It seems to me that lots of crimes against small companies are never solved, just as lots of crimes against the individual go unresolved. Gloves or lack of resources? We’ll never know.
A survey by Axa shows that in the second quarter of 2004, crimes against small businesses went up by 19.3 per cent, which shows either that criminals start to come out when the weather gets warmer or crime is getting worse.
Axa, apparently, give a free prevention toolkit on their website to help businesses protect themselves against criminals but I couldn’t find it. So I turned to the Federation of Small Businesses to see what they said about us SMEs and crime.
And that was even more frightening. The 2005 FSB survey, from some 18,000 businesses, showed that in 2003-2004, 58 per cent of businesses in the UK suffered at least one crime in the period.
Top of the list with 27 per cent was vandalism, with vehicle damage (Ah!) second with 26 per cent. Oddly, vehicle theft was only 9 per cent, but you have to wonder how much of the damage was caused by those unable to steal the car.
Burglary represented 14 per cent with graffiti at 13 per cent. Interestingly employee theft was only 8 per cent, with employee fraud at 6 per cent. I know one employee theft or fraud is one too many but for some reason I find those last two figures oddly encouraging.
Apparently it is older businesses that suffer most. The argument being that a lot of new business is home based and thus more secure, whereas older businesses tend to have offices, which tend not to be occupied at night. The FSB argues that businesses which are the victims of crime should receive compensation because lots of them exist on very small profit margins.
But the FSB also argues that the statistics could be a lot worse than 58 per cent because many businesses don’t report crimes and the resulting lack of data stops police from effectively tackling business crime.
They also want business and domestic crime to be separated when it comes to statistics. Which makes sense to me.
The FSB also suggests, very sensibly, that it’s up to business to help themselves, to make premises and car parks more secure; to seek advice from the police about CCTV cameras and crime prevention.
But there’s nothing I can do about my car park, though. Anyone want to buy a nine-year old Golf VR6 – one careful owner, two couldn’t careless thieves?
