A former Metropolitan Police chief has backed plans aimed at forcing Apple and Google to disable stolen smartphones.
Lord Hogan-Howe, who was head of the Met from 2011 to 2017, has sponsored an amendment to crime legislation in the House of Lords that would require the US tech giants to cut phones off from key services after they are reported stolen.
His support for the move comes amid mounting pressure on Apple and Google to help crack down on phone theft.
Across the UK, more than 80,000 smartphones were stolen last year, up from 64,000 in 2023. Around 80pc of them were Apple iPhones.
The amendment to the crime and policing bill – proposed by Lord Jackson of Peterborough, a Conservative peer – would mean that the companies have to block stolen phones from accessing services like app stores and cloud storage, making them effectively unusable.
It would also require companies that receive reports of stolen phones from users to pass on the information to the police and the National Crime Agency.
The proposal says this would “make the resale of stolen mobile phone devices abroad more difficult and thus reduce the incidents of phone thefts in the UK”.
It has been sponsored by Lord Hogan-Howe and Lord Clement-Jones, a Liberal Democrat peer.
Apple and Google already have features that can lock devices if they are reported as stolen – but in some cases, criminals are able to deactivate this if users have not activated additional security settings. Some of these features are not turned on by default.
Home Office officials and the police have been urging Apple to develop a so-called “kill switch” that could make phones unusable after they are reported stolen, although it has yet to do so.
In November, the Met accused Apple of failing to properly check whether phones have been stolen by vetting trade-in devices against a national register of missing handsets. The Met claimed Apple had access to the database but was not using it.
A senior Apple executive had suggested the Met should focus on “traditional policing” during a heated session before MPs in June.
Apple has told MPs that remotely blocking phones would not address the problem of stolen phones being disassembled and sold for parts.
The Met believes the majority of stolen phones are being taken by organised criminal gangs, ultimately ending up abroad where they are resold in China or Algeria or stripped for parts.
In September, UK mobile networks wrote to the Home Office to accuse Apple of refusing to implement technology that would enable a global block on phones that have been reported stolen from their shops.
