Scourge of the modern-day rustlers fleecing Scots farmers of millions
From Land Rover theft to sheep-stealing, how a disturbing crime wave is engulfing the countryside
IT was after nine o’clock on a late October night last year when farmer Andrew Glenn settled down in front of the television after a hard day in the hills. He had barely relaxed on the sofa in his farmhouse on the Kintyre peninsula when a ‘ping’ on his mobile prompted him to leap straight up out of his seat. There were thieves in the area.
‘Our neighbour had messaged to say their quad had just been stolen from his farm,’ he recalled. Having been targeted in the past, Mr Glenn and his partner jumped straight into their pick-up and headed down to their own farm buildings with a sense of dread.
‘When we got down, we saw all the locks were cut and then looked into the shed and our quad was gone. I stayed around and told my partner to go and phone the police. But as we closed the doors of the shed, we saw this van go flying past at 70 or 80 miles an hour.’
It took a split-second to realise they had in all probability disturbed the gang while they were still on their property.
The break-in was the third time in six years that valuable equipment had been stolen from Saddell Home Farm. He said: ‘After each incident, we have stepped up security to the point where the only way we can improve it is to bring everything of value into the house at night.
‘We must have spent well over £2,000 trying to make the farm secure. That is money we can ill-afford.
‘Just dealing with the extra security measures can add up to 30 minutes to your working day, which may not sound like much but just makes life that bit harder when you are already working 68-plus hours a week. It’s frustrating. It causes great anxiety and anger.’
It seems incongruous to imagine Mr Glenn’s dreamily wild 800 acres of east Kintyre – where he farms beef cattle and sheep and where, on a clear day, the peerless views stretch out across Saddell Bay to the Isle of Arran – as a hotbed of crime. But the 30-year-old farmer’s disconcerting experience is fast becoming the norm rather than the exception, as new figures released last month show Scotland is in the grip of a rural crimewave.
According to the latest NFU Mutual annual rural crime report, Scottish farmers have been hit by a staggering 52 per cent rise in rural crime in the last year which has left them £2.6million out of pocket.
The sudden spike in criminality north of the Border is all the more shocking when one considers that the UK as a whole actually saw rural thefts fall by 9 per cent to £41million over the same period. The sharp rise also comes against a backdrop of falling crime during the two-year Covid lockdown.
Now, however, the criminals are back and police chiefs are deeply worried about those spearheading this rise in law-breaking – ruthless organised crime gangs from the north of England who see Scotland’s rolling moors and glens, rich farmland and valuable forestry as a land of opportunity.
For these latter-day ‘Border Reivers’, there are no allegiances except to their own greed.
NFU Mutual, which insures three quarters of the farming community, says claims submitted by farmers reveal a multi-million-pound black market in anything – electrical equipment, quad bikes, diesel, fertilisers, chemicals, tools, even crops and livestock – that is reasonably portable, can be snatched quickly and has a decent value.
Police recorded the total cost of Scottish rural crime for October 2020 was £360,865, but this figure had soared to £683,396 in October last year. Most of the losses relate to stolen agricultural machinery and quad bikes – Mr Glenn was far from the only victim that month.
What troubles him most are the organised gangs, who plan meticulously and are prepared to travel great distances to carry out their raids. They use sophisticated technology, such as drones, to suss out where valuable machinery – and the security cameras designed to protect them – are located.
The Lothians and the Scottish Borders have been especially badly hit, but more remote areas are equally vulnerable – the opening up of the North Coast 500 scenic route may have brought tourist pounds but it has also attracted trouble.
Valuable kit, stolen overnight from farms, can be spirited across the Border in hours.
The NFU Mutual report highlighted some new ‘hot ticket items’ being
‘The gangs are known to be quite violent’
targeted by gangs. Old Land Rover Defenders, the indestructible workhorses of many farms, have soared in value – both as whole vehicles and broken up into parts – since production ended in 2016 and have become trendy ‘vintage’ modes of transport for affluent second-homers.
Classic Defenders in mint condition can fetch £50,000, and even wellused models sell for more than £30,000. The cost of claims involving Defenders shot up by 87 per cent last year. Some owners reported finding doors or wheels stripped from their vehicles while parked.
Rather depressingly, a recent poll by NFU Mutual suggested that 89 per cent of respondents believe inflation and the cost-of-living crisis will only lead to a worsening in rural crime. But, the despair at such lawlessness runs far deeper than mere exasperation for farmers.
‘After a theft, you do have a strong level of paranoia too,’ said Mr Glenn. ‘You’re always looking out of the window at every van or car that drives past slowly, or when you see lights pointing into your house in the middle of the night which are never normally there. It affected some of the farmers round here very badly.
‘There is fear too – most of the gangs that operate here are known to be quite violent if they’re confronted. It might have been a different story if we had been a couple of minutes earlier and gone into that shed, we might have stumbled upon them.’
In previous raids, he has lost a quad bike – which can cost around £10,000 new – a generator and power tools. Although on this occasion his quad was recovered, such losses are keenly felt by a man who works several jobs simply to make ends meet.
‘The margins are pretty skinny these days. I run a plant nursery, sell fresh eggs, and do landscape contract work just to help pay the bills and to afford this equipment, which is essential for the day-to-day running of our farm,’ he said.
‘People often move down to Kintyre as they think it is very safe here. Considering most of the rural population are on the older side, I know many of them are terrified after events like this.’
He added: ‘Kintyre would be one of those areas where everybody would leave everything open, but nobody does that now.’
Given that more than 95 per cent of Scotland is officially classified as rural, few places escape entirely the criminals’ grasp.
NFU Mutual chairman Jim McLaren, who farms in Perthshire, predicted things would get worse before they improved.
He said: ‘With diesel and fertiliser prices soaring and the cost-of-living crisis biting, it looks likely that we will see rural crime rise in the coming months. Current supply chain shortages mean farmers who suffer a theft are facing delays sourcing replacement equipment which may be vital to carrying out essential farm work.’
Senior police officers are in no doubt rural crime has changed dramatically over the last few years.
‘Previously it had a low profile,’ said Inspector Alan Dron, Police Scotland’s lead on rural crime. ‘Increasingly, there is evidence of organised criminality within rural communities and it is doing a lot of harm.’
Ironically, lockdown provided a
short-term fix, as anyone travelling outside their local area was liable to be stopped by police.
But as the country opened up again, criminals, like everyone else, simply returned to their old habits – and the countryside.
‘If you take a tractor or combine harvester, these are big value items,’ said Mr Dron.
‘In forestry, some of the logging machinery just sits there and a lot of the machines have got same-use keys because a lot of different contractors could be jumping in and out of the cab at any time. Also, Scotland is an accessible country; you can get to most places on Broads that have no cameras on them, people aren’t as populous and there’s lots of opportunity.’
That ready accessibility has proved one of the biggest headaches in protecting remote communities from criminals happy to take advantage of a fragmented approach to cross-Border policing, which allowed well-drilled gangs to slip through the cracks, Mr Dron told farming podcast, OnFarm.
In one case in 2019, he said, one gang travelled from County Durham to target an ATM in a convenience store in the village of Torphins, Aberdeenshire, stealing a telehandler – a larger version of a forklift – to rip the cash machine from the building, a converted church. The perpetrators were caught and all received custodial sentences – but Mr Dron said it also transpired they were responsible for around 100 other crossBorder rural crimes.
‘And the reason they did it was because they knew the difficulties in police forces, in local authorities, to talk across boundaries,’ he said.
Mr Dron now chairs the Scottish Partnership Against Rural Crime (SPARC), set up in 2019 to coordinate action by Police Scotland, NFUS, local authorities, Scottish Fire and Rescue, the Scottish Government and Network Rail.
Over the past four years, NFU Mutual has invested more than £240,000 to support SPARC, and in 2021 provided a 4x4 vehicle to help rural crime officers in remote locations, along with hundreds of forensic property marking kits.
Police Scotland is also now involved in a cross-Border operation with forces in Northumbria, County Durham, Cumbria and Cleveland – called Operation Hawkeye – in an attempt to disrupt raids from the South.
Intelligence gathered by Hawkeye has already revealed the ‘majority of targeted rural crime’ committed in Scotland is carried out by a couple of organised crime groups plus several key families from the criminal element of the travelling fraternity who are linked and travel extensively throughout Scotland and the north of England, according to SPARC.
They can build up patterns of criminal behaviour, identify possible targets and favoured escape routes, and even the likely times when crimes will be committed.
‘Hopefully, those who thought Scotland was a place of easy pickings will find it a rather more hostile environment,’ said Mr Dron.
Farmers are becoming incentivised through insurance firms to have trackers placed on machinery, which helps police locate it.
They also take photographs of kit or a prized pedigree animal to help with identification should it be stolen. Some are using a hi-tech solution to rustling, where each animal’s fleece is daubed with a ‘smart’ marker fluid, containing thousands of coded microdots that allow the sheep to be traced and are virtually
‘They will find it a more hostile environment’
impossible to remove. Mr Dron said it was vital that local communities understood the key to solving rural crime lay in their own hands: ‘They should know who their neighbour is and if they see a white van man that’s on their land or up a drive, do they do anything about it?
‘We need to make life as difficult as possible for anyone wanting to break in or commit a crime.
‘Criminality wants an easy life, so our whole thing is about making sure they don’t get an easy life.’
For his part, Mr Glenn has now used a property-marking kit on his machinery and has set up a private WhatsApp group for local farmers to alert each other about any suspicious activity.
‘It means we can let the police know without everybody else knowing,’ he said.
He refuses to be cowed, though: ‘Hopefully, if we sort out the cooperation between the police, the NFUS and all of us we can stop it. It’s going to take time.
‘But the one thing farmers do is take these things on the chin and just keep on moving. We don’t have much choice, do we?’