TEN thousand car-jackings take place in Britain each year as tighter security forces thieves to switch to violence to seize vehicles.

Officials at the National Audit Office (NAO) base the figure on a study of vehicle theft in Manchester and the Northumbria police area that found that 4 per cent of crimes had been car-jackings.

The figure for the total number of cases of vehicle crime in 2003-04 was more than two million.

Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, which is investigating the Government’s drive to cut overall car crime, said that car-jacking was a growing problem and was particularly frightening for victims.

He added: “The Home Office must work closely with car manufacturers to ensure technological advances in security are translated into practical new measures to foil car thieves. And, as vehicle security improves, the Home Office should take more seriously other forms of vehicle crime — such as vandalism and car-jackings — that are largely ignored in relation to the existing target.”

It is the first time an official estimate has been put on the extent of a crime that has grown as a result of thieves becoming frustrated at the difficulty of breaking into new cars with advanced security features.

Car-jacking is an international phenomenon that has spread with the development of anti-theft systems in expensive vehicles, making them difficult to start without keys. Five years ago it was a crime more common on the streets of South Africa and America and was almost unheard of in Britain.

Instead of trying to break into cars, thieves force drivers to hand over their keys or break into homes to steal them. Several people have been killed during car-jackings and many more injured.

The preferred cars are BMWs, Porsches, Mercedes and Jaguars. Some are stolen to order by organised gangs, who will often blitz an area and steal several in one week.

In one seven-month period officers estimate that more than £7 million of cars were stolen from and around Chigwell in Essex.

The cars often have their “identities” changed and are then sold at auction or are put into containers and shipped abroad.

Africa is a popular destination, especially for Mercedes, which are then used as taxis. Even though the cars can be worth tens of thousands of pounds, the thieves will only get several hundred pounds for each car they steal.

Gangs use a range of tactics to seize the vehicles, including bumping from behind. When the driver stops to examine the damage, armed men jump into the car and drive off.

Others target a car, wait for the owner to return and force them at gun or knifepoint to hand over the keys.

In London it is estimated that there were 1,200 car-jackings in 2001. Eighty per cent of cars were recovered soon after.

The report by the Public Accounts Committee praises the Home Office for its work in focusing on vehicle crime but said more needed to be done, particularly in making car parks more secure.

Twenty per cent of all vehicle crime takes place in car parks but only 1,350 of the 20,000 car parks in England and Wales were part of a safer car parking scheme involving greater use of closed-circuit television.

The worst offenders were hospital and railway station car parks, which remained hot spots for vehicle crime, the report said.

Britain’s motor manufacturers have refused to display the insurance industry’s car security star ratings at car showrooms to help the public know which cars are at greater risk of theft.

The report also criticised the police for failing to solve more than 6 per cent of thefts from vehicles and 13 per cent of vehicle thefts. In addition, the report found that there were almost one million unregistered vehicles on the roads in Britain.