Police charge ailing victim £105 to recover stolen car

I'm paying for a crime committed against me'

By Will Davies

A FORMER lorry driver from Henley, who had his car stolen and was then charged over £100 by police to have it recovered, says he feels ‘absolutely gutted’.

Lewis Robinson, aged 50, a chronic diabetic who suffers from serious neurological damage, was awoken by police at his home in Crisp Road at 3 a.m. last Thursday morning and told his car, an E-reg Vauxhall Nova, had been stolen.

“Police gave me a phone number and told me to call it and report the car as stolen,” said Mr. Robinson. “When I did this I was told the car had been abandoned at Hennerton Golf Club, near Wargrave, but that I couldn’t collect it as it had been taken to a forensic yard in Winnersh to be examined.

“Why couldn’t they do the forensic work where the car was found?”

Police told Mr. Robinson the car was so badly damaged that it could not be driven, but when he went to collect it, the car was driveable.“The headlamp was bent, the bonnet and both wings were dented and the windscreen smashed, but it wasn’t written off,” he added.

Mr. Robinson was forced to pay Thames Valley Police £105 to get his car back and is outraged that, although he was the victim, police have made him pay and not the culprits.“I am paying for a crime committed against me,” he said. “I could have had the AA pick it up for free as I am a member.”

He says he has ‘no faith’ in police catching the thieves and said they were ‘not at all sympathetic’ when charging him to collect his car.“It’s a lot of money. I cannot work and have to survive on disability benefit. This money for the police has taken a large chunk of that.”

Mr. Robinson struggles to walk more than a 100 yards, so relies heavily on driving, especially to do his groceries and to get to the many doctors appointments and hospital visits he must make every month. He says the damage to his car would cost over £4,000 to be repaired.

"If this hadn’t happened, the car would have sailed through its MOT next year and I would have been driving it for at least another couple of years," he said.

“As it is, I cannot afford to pay for the repairs so when the MOT is due it will have to be scrapped and I will be carless. Whoever did this doesn’t realise the damage they’ve caused.”

Thames Valley Police says it recovers found stolen vehicles ‘as a matter of course’. The force’s Vehicle Recovery Scheme spells out its reasons as preventing ‘secondary theft’ and ‘an opportunity to fingerprint and examine stolen vehicles under controlled conditions’.

It also states that owners covered by comprehensive or third party, fire and theft insurance ‘will usually find that all such charges are recoverable from their insurers’.
A spokesman for Thames Valley Police, Rebecca Webber said: “Leading UK insurers have been instrumental in establishing with police forces a protocol for dealing with found stolen vehicles.”