By Frank Cannon, Programme Director, Rural SafeGuard
I write in response to NFU Mutual’s Rural Crime Report 2026 (News, 29 May), which deserves credit for its transparency, yet warrants careful scrutiny before its figures shape policy.
First, NFU Mutual is but one insurance provider. Despite its prominence, it does not cover every holding. Cornish Mutual, Howden Rural, Aviva, AXA, Zurich and others all under write agricultural risk.
A headline figure of a 6% annual fall drawn from a single insurer’s claims data is therefore a partial snapshot, not a national picture. A reported fall in payouts may reflect a contraction in market share rather than any genuine reduction in offending.
Second, the government’s January 2026 policing White Paper proposes the most radical force restructuring in two centuries. The creation of larger, more centralised forces in England and Wales risks pushing rural crime off the agenda entirely. We need only look to Scotland and Northern Ireland, where super-national forces now operate and where rural crime is rising sharply, to see the danger of sacrificing specialist local knowledge to the pursuit of efficiency
Third, our farmers are simply not taught to configure their farms to reduce crime. There is no meaningful crime-reduction curriculum within agricultural or land-management courses. Young farmers, estate managers and rural business owners enter the industry with no grounding in security risk assessment or crime prevention.
I would add one essential clarification. The NFU Mutual data is genuinely useful for communicating crime trends, mainly concerning property loss. It does not, however, quantify the true cost of rural crime across the UK, which is precisely what almost everyone uses it for.
Until all major insurers pool anonymised data, and include all rural crime types, any national cost figure remains, at best, an informed estimate.
