OPINION
How the Grinch stole bicycles S
The story of how Cycling UK persuaded BTP to reverse its policy By Duncan Dollimore, Head of Campaigns, Cycling UK
ee it, say it, sort it yourself. That seemed to be the message from British Transport Police (BTP) last year to anyone whose bike was stolen at a train station.
If you’ve cycled to catch a train, chances
are you’re going to need to leave it there for longer than two hours. You might be planning to return later that day or even the next, but most of the time, the train journey itself is longer than two hours. That’s why in October last year, we were shocked to learn British Transport Police had a new policy to refuse the investigation of cycle thefts where the bike was left at the station for more than two hours, or where the bike was worth less than £200. Cycling UK members started contacting us about the issue, having received replies from BTP refusing to look at CCTV footage. Realising the impact this would have on people who rely on bikes as part of their journey, we immediately released a statement condemning the policy. Rather than
46 | March 2026
take the opportunity to concede that the BTP crime screening policy was badly worded and commit to reviewing it, they chose to defend it, and a few days later, I was heading up to Manchester on a Sunday evening to talk about the issue on BBC Breakfast. We know our members and supporters are passionate about cycling, but we saw many other people recognise the policy’s faults and how it effectively decriminalised theft. After we wrote formally to BTP asking them to urgently review
their policy, we began to see people contact their MPs, making the same arguments we were. In the beginning, BTP doubled down. They replied to our letter saying what we said about their policy wasn’t true, even though we quoted directly from it. MPs who wrote to BTP also started to receive cut-and-paste responses to the same effect. No matter what people asked, they got the same response.
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