Met chief urges law to force firms to publish stolen phone data

The Metropolitan Police chief has escalated the fight over stolen phones into a demand for law, saying companies must publish data on stolen devices or face legislation that forces them to act. Sir Mark Rowley warned in March that if industry did not come forward with serious commitments by June, he would ask the government to intervene, arguing that phone theft is no longer just a street crime but a global organised business.

The pressure is mounting because stolen phones still carry value long after they disappear from a London pavement. The Met said devices are exported, reactivated and resold overseas within days, sometimes for more than their original UK retail price. In its latest four-week crackdown, officers made 248 arrests targeting prolific pickpockets, phone snatchers, handlers and people linked to international export networks.

The scale of the problem remains stark. The House of Commons Library said 78,000 people in England and Wales had phones or bags snatched in the year ending March 2024, about 200 snatch thefts a day, and a 153% rise on the previous year. It said London was the epicentre of phone theft, with £50 million worth of phones reported stolen there in 2024, while the Metropolitan Police dealt with 64,244 mobile phone thefts, more than three-quarters of the national total. The National Crime Agency says stolen phones are moved overseas, including to China, Dubai, Algeria, Morocco, Romania and Bulgaria.

London officials say enforcement is starting to move the numbers. The Met said mobile phone theft in the capital fell by 12% in 2025, about 10,000 fewer victims, with official figures showing incidents dropping from 81,365 in 2024 to around 71,391 in 2025. Sadiq Khan has backed the wider crackdown, and City Hall announced an extra £4.5m on 17 February 2026 alongside a proposed new mobile phone Command Cell in the West End to coordinate intelligence and respond to theft and robbery.

Industry and Parliament have already been pulled into the fight. In December 2025, former Met commissioner Lord Hogan-Howe backed a House of Lords amendment sponsored by Lord Jackson of Peterborough and supported by Lord Clement-Jones that would require Apple and Google to disable stolen smartphones after they were reported stolen, block access to services such as app stores and cloud storage, and pass reports to the police and the National Crime Agency.

The Met said on 11 June 2026 that it had reached an agreement with Apple to make stolen phones unusable, with Apple making a global security change to help ensure devices cannot be reused or resold. The force said it was sharing stolen-device identifiers with Apple and that early data showed many phones in a recent sample had not been successfully reactivated, while Samsung and Google were also making security changes. For police, the test now is not whether the technology exists, but whether firms will use it fast enough to cut off the resale market that keeps phone theft profitable.