FOI 3063453 - Burglary/theft on Building sites

Your Request

I am seeking figures for recorded crimes of burglary and theft occurring at construction or
building sites in your force area over the last five full years (2020 to 2025). If you can provide
the data for 2026 too (year to date or up to the most recent date you can) this will also be
gratefully received.

By "construction or building site" I mean premises where building, civil engineering or
demolition work is taking place, including sites under active development and their associated
compounds, site offices and storage.

If you hold a searchable "location type" or "premises type" field, please provide figures for
whichever categories correspond to construction/building sites and state those in your
response.

For each of the five years (and 2026 if applicable) please provide the number of recorded
crimes, broken down by offence type, for:
1)Burglary (business and community / non-residential) at construction or building sites; and
2)Theft of building materials, plant, tools or equipment from construction or building sites.

In addition, for each of these recorded crimes, is it possible to provide a geographic breakdown
at the most detailed area level you are able to release without breaching data protection? ' for
example by local authority district, policing area/BCU, town, or partial (outward) postcode.

Freedom of Information Act 2000

I can confirm that the information requested is held by Durham Constabulary. See below tables of the information that is being released to you:

Please note that Durham Constabulary does not record a specific location or premises type for
"building site" or "construction site" locations. However, a modus operandi keyword of "building
site" may be applied to relevant crimes.

A search was therefore conducted for all recorded theft and burglary business and community
offences where the modus operandi keyword contained "building site". Information was then
extracted from the records identified through this search and used to answer the questions.

Question 1-A search was conducted for all recorded crimes between 1 January 2020 and 31
August 2026 under Home Office offence codes 030/02 and 031/00 (Burglary Business and
Community) where the modus operandi keywords contained the term "building site". The
results were matched against a beat lookup to identify the relevant sector and were then
broken down by calendar year, up to and including August 2026.

Question 2-Using the same search criteria as Question 1, all property records linked to the
identified crimes were extracted and grouped by overall property type.
Please note that the figures provided represent a count of property records linked to the
relevant crimes, rather than a count of crimes. A single crime may have more than one property
item associated with it and may therefore be represented more than once within the property
data.